Rice dishes ── Sushi
Kakimaze
Kakimaze — a five-color mixed sushi from the Kumano coast
Tuna or saury cured in vinegar is folded into vinegared rice along with finely chopped, simmered ingredients, a mixed sushi from the southern Higashi-Kishu coast. Made for weddings, funerals, and other gatherings, it traditionally combines five or seven ingredients — always an odd number.
- Origin: Mie
- About 380 km southwest of Tokyo
What it's made of
Kakimaze is a five-ingredient sushi made by mixing cooked rice with vinegar-cured tuna or saury and finely chopped, simmered vegetables. Locals reportedly also call it o-maze. It's made for celebrations and gatherings, typically with an odd number of ingredients, five or seven. The fish's tartness and the sweet-salty simmering liquid from the vegetables spread evenly through the rice.
How it's made
Cooked rice is left to steam, then mixed with vinegared seasoning and pre-simmered fish and vegetables, cut through with a paddle rather than stirred. For celebrations, tuna is filleted and marinated in vinegar, while saury is grilled and flaked, and seasonal touches are added: wild greens in spring, salted lotus-stem greens called toimo in summer. It's sometimes eaten wrapped in a green leaf.
Why it took this shape
The dish is said to be a distinctive specialty of southern Higashi-Kishu, made for celebrations and whenever hard-to-find ingredients like wild greens or toimo became available. It was reportedly also prepared to reward neighbors after communal work such as road maintenance, with a story that children would wait eagerly for the extra to be brought home. A similar dish exists in neighboring Wakayama Prefecture, suggesting this shape grew out of a shared, communal wisdom in coastal villages.
Before you go
- How to read a vertical menuIn shops with strips of handwritten menu items on the wall, the top-right spot is often used for recommendations.
- How to use a convenience storeA quick guide to choosing rice balls and hot snacks, buying coffee, paying by cash, IC card, or tap payment, using the eat-in corner, and sorting your trash — the basics for a first visit.
- How to shop at a supermarketHow to choose prepared foods, sashimi, and packaged sushi, when discount stickers tend to appear, region-only specialties, buying by weight, the checkout and bagging flow, and sampling etiquette at a local supermarket.
Dishes in the same style
- Aburi-zushiNigiri with just its surface flash-seared by torch or hot iron. Unlike Edomae's shigoto curing for keeping, the searing here is done purely for the change in aroma and fat it brings — a relatively recent way of eating sushi.
- Aichi HakozushiVinegared rice is packed into a wooden frame, topped with shrimp, eel, shiitake, and egg arranged diagonally, and pressed. Placing toppings on the diagonal so everyone gets a fair share of each is said to be a feature of the Owari and western Mikawa style, made for celebrations.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Also from Mie
- AhodakiOld takuan pickle, once its flavor and aroma have faded, is desalted and simmered again in soy sauce, a pantry staple from the Hokusei area. Its name — playfully self-deprecating, roughly "doing a foolish thing" — nods to eating it well past its prime, a frugal way to waste nothing.
- Arame MakiRehydrated arame, a brown seaweed once offered to Ise Shrine, is wrapped several times around sardine or saury and simmered in soy sauce and sugar. The choice of fish shifts by locality along the Toba coast.
- Bon JiruA miso soup packed with seasonal vegetables such as burdock, eggplant, and pumpkin. Following Zen Buddhist practice of avoiding killing during Obon, it skips bonito or dried-fish stock, relying instead on fried tofu and a generous mix of vegetables for its savor.
- ChagayuRice is cooked in water steeped with a bag of roasted tea leaves. Born in Iga, where farmland was scarce and rice precious, the extra water was a way to stretch the grain further; in summer some households chill the porridge before eating.
- ChatsuJulienned daikon, carrot, lotus root, kelp, and fried tofu are simmered in vinegar and sugar, a dish from Asahi town. Its name is said to come from "chatsu," the red-lacquered vessel once used to serve vegetarian temple food, and soy sauce is deliberately left out to keep the dish pale.
- Fuki DawaraRice cooked with soybeans is wrapped in butterbur leaves into a small rice-bale shape, an Iga-area harvest offering. It is set before the rice-paddy deity at planting time to pray for a good crop, and doubles as a portable snack for breaks between farm work.