A dango from Sajima, on the western side of the Miura peninsula in Yokosuka. Cake flour is mixed with water and kneaded, torn into pieces, flattened, boiled, and coated with sweet bean paste. That is the entire recipe and it has not needed revising.

The name has two competing explanations and no settled answer. One says it is simply because the dumplings are pressed flat. Another says the shape resembles a hera, the flat wooden tool used in fishing work. Neither has displaced the other.

In Sajima it belongs to the summer boat festival, which has run since the Edo period. Offerings are made for a good catch and for freedom from illness, and these dumplings are presented alongside the Sajima Ofunauta, a set of boat songs designated an important intangible folk cultural property by the city, and alongside local sea bream.

Households make a batch to coincide with the festival, put some on the family altar, and eat the rest with whichever relatives have gathered. Inland, around Serizawa in Zama, the same dumplings were simply what farmers ate in the afternoon. A festival on the water and a break between fields, and the same flat piece of dough turns up at both of them.