The belly is not cut all the way along. A small section near the pelvic fin is deliberately left joined, so that the fish is opened without ever being entirely opened. Murakami was a castle town, and a fully slit belly would have suggested seppuku, which is not something anyone wants hanging under the eaves all winter. Another version of the reason says it differently: the salmon kept this town alive, so you do not make it disembowel itself.

The hanging follows the same reasoning. The salmon goes up head downward, suspended by the tail, because a fish hung by the neck would resemble a hanged man, and because in a castle town nothing lifts its head higher than the lord. Coarse salt is rubbed in and left for anything from a few days to a week, then washed out again, and the fish dries slowly in that position in the cold wind coming off the sea.

The Miomote River behind the town has always had salmon in it. Around two hundred and fifty years ago a retainer of the domain noticed that the fish return to the river they were born in, and built a side channel off the main flow where they could spawn and the eggs could hatch undisturbed.

So the same town holds two things at once. One is a piece of practical natural history, arrived at by watching a river for years. The other is a rule about which way up you hang a fish, arrived at by manners. Both are still obeyed, and nobody treats that as a contradiction.