Yellow fruit shows over the top of the earthen walls in Hagi — the summer orange, which originated up the coast at Ohibi and is now the prefectural flower — and visitors take the sight for something ancient. It is not. That landscape was made deliberately, and recently, by people who had run out of options.

In 1863 the domain government moved from Hagi to Yamaguchi, and the castle town it left behind stopped working as an economy. A man named Obata Takamasa began sowing summer-orange seed in the samurai houses standing empty, and handing seedlings out to former retainers who no longer had employment. Within a generation the town had turned into an orchard.

The confection is made from the peel. The peel is simmered until it softens, and then sugar — roughly its own weight in sugar, added in three goes — is cooked into it slowly. The bitterness is not removed. It is left in, underneath the sweetness, where you meet it a second after the sugar.

So this is a sweet built out of the part you would throw away, from a tree planted by people who had lost their positions. The yellow that everybody photographs in Hagi began as a relief scheme. The peel candy is the part of that story you can still buy in a box.