Konnyaku is cut into fine strands and seasoned with soy sauce and sugar. Over it go white fish soboro, dyed in two colors, red and white, finely chopped mandarin peel, and spring onion. On a round platter these are laid out as four fans of ninety degrees each, meeting at the center, in four colors.

The konnyaku underneath disappears entirely.

The name has attracted several explanations. In Uwajima konnyaku is called yamafuku, so cutting it like noodles gives fuku-men. Or the soboro covers it completely, fukumen meaning a mask. Or fukume is a word for cutting things fine.

The four colors are said to carry meaning of their own. The red soboro is spring, the green onion is summer, the orange of the mandarin is autumn, the white soboro is winter. A year on one plate, which is why it belongs to the days that matter: festivals, new year, weddings, celebrations of long life. It is said to have come down from the Uwajima domain as a dish for its observances, and the konnyaku at the base of it was a crop that kept producing through the famines of the Edo period. The whole technique of the dish is concealment, and it is the concealment that makes it formal.