Shippoku is the round red-lacquered table itself. Large dishes are set out on top of it, each one holding several people's worth of food, and everybody at the table takes from them using their own chopsticks.

That arrangement is really the entire point of the thing. There is no individual tray for anyone, no order of precedence built into the seating, and rank does not determine what arrives in front of you, for the simple reason that nothing arrives in front of you at all. Everybody reaches for the same plate.

The serving format itself came from fucha ryori, the Chinese-style vegetarian temple cuisine brought over to Japan by the monk Ingen and others in the seventeenth century. What got placed onto it, in Nagasaki, was a menu the townspeople had assembled out of Japanese, Chinese, and Dutch cooking, which is why it is also called wakaran ryori, the wa-ka-ran being Japan, China, and Holland.

The meal itself opens with the host saying ohire wo dozo, please take the fin. The word refers to the soup that arrives first, and the sentence carries one very specific meaning: a whole sea bream has been used for each guest sitting at this table. The hospitality is stated before anything is eaten.