The season comes twice and then stops. From the middle of March to early June, and again from late October to late December, the boats go out of Yui for sakura shrimp; through the summer, while the shrimp are spawning, nobody fishes at all. Suruga Bay is the only place in the country where they are taken commercially, which means the entire supply of a national ingredient rests on one stretch of water.

It began by accident. In 1894 two fishermen from Yui were working a net for horse mackerel when it sank deeper than they had intended, and came up full of small pink shrimp. Proper fishing for them started the following year. The town has been organized around those two short seasons ever since.

The kakiage is nothing but the shrimp, bound with a thin batter and dropped into oil. It comes out a deeper pink than it went in, a tangle the size of a saucer, and it tastes faintly of the sea and faintly bitter, the way the heads of shrimp do. You eat it on rice, or on noodles, or standing at the cooperative's own stall inside the harbour.

In 2018 the spring catch was the lowest ever recorded and the autumn season was called off entirely. The fishermen drew a protected zone around the spawning grounds and began limiting their own boats and their own hauls. There is a lesson sitting there. A short season is not a misfortune here; it is the reason there is any season at all.