Guru is a Tosa word meaning the group, everybody, all of us together. The dish takes its name from the way it is made: daikon, carrot, burdock, konjac and fried tofu all cut down to the same two-centimetre dice and put into a single pot, with nothing kept separate and nothing given special treatment. Only the taro is cooked apart and added afterwards, because it would otherwise break up and cloud everything.

It started as an offering. The six characters of the Buddhist invocation set the number of ingredients at six, and that was how it went onto the altar. Few households count any more. What survived was not the number but the pot.

You make a great deal of it at once and then eat it for days. It improves with each reheating, the flavour working further into the vegetables every time the pot goes back onto the heat, so that the second day is better than the first and the third is better than the second. This is not a dish anybody eats at its best straight away.

It turns up in school lunches now, and on menus around the prefecture, but there is nothing impressive about it. Brown vegetables in a brown broth, made from whatever the winter has to offer, kept on the stove and returned to. But whether or not a house has a pot like this going in January makes a considerable difference to what the winter feels like from inside it.