The body is transparent. Alive, these shrimp have almost no colour to them at all, and the reason they can be fished commercially in one bay and nowhere else is a submarine canyon called the aigame, a deep trench running into Toyama Bay where they gather in numbers.

They are small, and every one of them has to be peeled by hand. For a long time that was the obstacle: too fiddly to be worth the labour, so most of what came up went nowhere in particular. Then somebody worked out that freezing them first makes the shells come away easily, even for an amateur, and the shrimp were reconsidered as food.

Peeled and laid out on a plate, they let the pattern underneath show faintly through them. The taste arrives sweet before it arrives as anything else, with none of the iodine you might be bracing for. Some places press them between sheets of kelp for a day, which firms the flesh and lends it a second, quieter flavour.

It is a food whose history is really the history of a technique. The shrimp were always down there in the canyon and the bay always knew it. They simply could not be got out of their shells quickly enough to matter until somebody thought of the freezer.