Dried Fish

I took this photo back in 1995, when I was working in Kudamatsu, Japan. This is a fish drying rack, set up along side the road in front of someone's house, along the coast near the town of Hikari. The fish are salted, and can be eaten like potato chips. A few days after taking this photo, I went to a bar for a company drinking party, and the bar set out a basket of this kind of dried fish for us to snack on. The taste isn't bad, but the smell's a little off and it's REALLY crunchy (it's almost nothing but salt, bones and cartiledge. A great source of calcium.)



There's an entire class of sun-dried seafood called "himono". I did a yahoo photo search on himono the other day, and mostly got hits on squid and cuttle fish. No photos like the one above. But, in an island country like Japan, you've got to expect that fish is going to show up in the diet in many weird and unexpected ways (not a big fan of eel, though...)