Shiokatsuo is a whole bonito cured through with salt and then left to the dry winter wind off the sea. Shizuoka Prefecture's own account puts its history at more than fifteen hundred years, older than katsuobushi, and records it going up from Tago as tribute to the capital at Nara. In Tago it is bound to the belief in the toshigami-sama, the deity of the incoming year, and at New Year it is set on the kamidana, the household god-shelf, together with its straw ornament. Fishing villages across the country once made it. Tago, in Nishiizu-cho, is the only place that still does. Kanesa Katsuobushi Shoten, founded in 1882, is the one house in the country that carries the whole of it, from the curing of the shiokatsuo to the tying of the straw ornament, and it is now in the hands of the fifth generation, Serizawa Yasuhisa. They also keep the oldest of the drying methods, tebiyama-shiki: a pit dug some two meters deep, oak, sawtooth oak and cherry logs from Izu burning at the bottom, and the fish taken by direct flame at high heat. Very few katsuobushi makers anywhere in Japan still work that way. The shiokatsuo season does not open until early November, when the air finally begins to dry.
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