Rice is sharpened with yuzu vinegar rather than rice vinegar, and pressed under myoga ginger, hasu-imo stem, and shiitake. Bamboo shoot and konnyaku are hollowed and stuffed. There is almost no fish anywhere on the plate. Laid out together the colours run green, brown and white, with nothing pink or silver anywhere, and visitors sometimes fail to recognise the tray as sushi at all.

In Kochi the mountains come almost to the shore, and the villages inland were not reached by the day's catch. People made the shape of sushi out of whatever happened to be to hand on the hillside. Rice was expensive too, so for a long time this appeared only at weddings, funerals and festivals.

There was no collective name for it. People said konnyaku sushi, or bamboo shoot sushi, item by item. The term inaka-zushi, country sushi, was coined in 1986 by a village women's group entering a national competition, and it stuck.

It is stacked on the stalls of the Sunday market in Kochi city every week. Cheap, keeps well, and outsells everything else on the table. It has also moved into farm shops and supermarkets, which is what happens to a festival food when it turns out to be practical.