Sea bream is sliced raw, steeped in a sauce of dashi, soy and mirin, and mixed with a raw egg yolk, sesame, seaweed and whatever else the house adds. The lot goes over hot rice. Nothing is cooked into the rice at any stage, which is the point people from elsewhere keep missing.

Elsewhere in the same prefecture, in Imabari and Matsuyama, taimeshi means something else entirely: a whole bream cooked in the pot with the rice, seasoned with salt, soy and kelp, then flaked and stirred through. Two dishes, one name, an hour apart by road, and neither side shows the slightest interest in resolving the matter or in pretending that the other version does not exist.

The Uwajima version is traced to the navies of the Inland Sea in the Muromachi period, eaten aboard ship. The explanation is at least mechanically sound: nothing in it needs a fire except the rice, and rice can be cooked once and carried.

The yolk coats the grains and the fish goes half-opaque where the sauce has worked on it. The sauce is nothing complicated: dashi, soy, mirin, a yolk beaten through it. A method invented on a boat, arriving at a restaurant table more or less unchanged.