A warigo is a wooden box. Take a rectangle, cut it from the middle at an angle, and you have two of them; stacked together they fan out like a hand of cards. The container came first and the meal was shaped to fit it.

Two boxes have always counted as one person's portion. A household would pack as many as it needed, tie them up, and carry them on somebody's back to the stage in the shrine precinct. On Shodoshima, at Hitoyama, farmers' kabuki is still performed on the third of May, and at Nakayama on the second Sunday of October. The Nakayama company traces itself back about three hundred years, to islanders who went on pilgrimage to Ise and brought the plays home with them.

Inside is vinegared rice, pressed into shape in a wooden mould so that it comes out matching the box, and simmered vegetables alongside it: burdock, carrot, lotus root, konjac, fish cake. The seasoning varies from house to house and everybody has an opinion about whose is correct.

You open it on the matting during a break between acts, with the play still going on behind you. Nowhere else in the country still uses these boxes. A piece of eating equipment survived because a village kept putting on plays, which is a thin thread for an object to hang from, and it has held.