Echizen-gani and Matsuba-gani Are the Same Crab: What Decides a Local Speciality Is Not the Prefecture

Once the stay is booked, the next thing you look up is what the place has.

Tomaribi records local specialities for 85 areas. Three hundred and forty-two of them.

Four per area, 342 in all

Every one of the 85 areas has entries, 342 items in total. That is 4.0 per area, each with a short note.

Count the distinct names, though, and there are only 283. The difference is the same name turning up in another area.

Three in ten are also somewhere else’s speciality

Forty-two names appear in more than one area. Counted as items that is 101 of the 342, or 30%.

Most repeated first:

Speciality	Areas	Prefectures
Apples	4	Nagano, Aomori, Gunma
Spiny lobster	4	Chiba, Mie, Shizuoka, Wakayama
Shinshu soba	4	Nagano
Octopus	3	Kumamoto, Aichi, Hiroshima/Ehime
Echizen-gani	3	Fukui
Winter yellowtail	3	Ishikawa, Toyama, Niigata
Sweet shrimp	3	Fukui, Hokkaido
Whitebait	3	Kanagawa, Ibaraki
Highland vegetables	3	Nagano, Tochigi
Runner beans	3	Nagano, Gunma
Onsen manju	3	Kanagawa, Shizuoka, Gunma

Of the 42, 19 cross prefecture lines and 23 stay inside one prefecture. Those are two different stories, so we will take them in turn.

The Onomichi and Shimanami Kaido area straddles Hiroshima and Ehime, which is why octopus covers four prefectures across three areas.

One crab had become four specialities

Nine items have crab in the name. Read the notes and something curious appears.

• Echizen-gani (Echizen coast, Fukui): “the snow crab that defines the winter Echizen coast, rich in both meat and roe”
• Echizen-gani (Tojinbo, Fukui): “the male snow crab caught in the Sea of Japan”
• Matsuba-gani (Kinosaki Onsen, Hyogo): “the premium snow crab that defines winter in Tajima”
• Matsuba-gani (Kyotango, Kyoto): “the snow crab that defines the winter Sea of Japan, king of Tango’s flavours”
• Taiza-gani (Amanohashidate, Kyoto): “a brand of Matsuba-gani landed in Tango. The phantom crab”
• Seiko-gani (Tojinbo, Fukui): “the female Echizen-gani, rich in inner and outer roe”

The same snow crab is Echizen-gani in Fukui and Matsuba-gani in Hyogo and Kyoto, and the ones landed at Taiza port become Taiza-gani. The females alone get a separate name.

Of the nine, only the giant spider crab of Nishi-Izu in Shizuoka (“the world’s largest deep-sea crab”) is a different animal.

Which is to say that the name belongs not to the animal but to the port it was landed at. Taiza-gani being described as “a brand of Matsuba-gani” says it best: there is a brand inside the brand.

What decides it is the current and the altitude

Look at the 19 that cross prefectures and the arrangement has a reason.

Spiny lobster, four areas. Tateyama and Minami-Boso in Chiba (“among the country’s largest landings, the Boshu spiny lobster”), Ise-Shima in Mie (“the premium prawn of the Shima sea”), Shimoda and Minami-Izu in Shizuoka (“an autumn and winter taste from the Minami-Izu rocks”), Nanki-Shirahama in Wakayama (“a premium lobster from the Kishu rocks”). All four are Pacific rocky shores where the Kuroshio current runs.

Winter yellowtail, three areas. Noto in Ishikawa, Tateyama and Toyama, Sado in Niigata. Three prefectures ringing Toyama Bay, each noted as “fattening in the winter Sea of Japan”.

Apples, four areas. Azumino in Nagano (“sunshine and swings in temperature”), Fukaura and Kuroishi in Aomori, Minakami in Gunma (“orchards high on the flank of Tanigawa-dake”). Where altitude and temperature range line up, apples appear regardless of the prefecture.

In what decides the facilities is the land we found no pools in Hokkaido and no onsen in Okinawa. Food works the same way. What decides a speciality is not an administrative line but a current, an altitude and a soil.

Inside one prefecture, specialities are shared

The 23 that repeat within a single prefecture mean something else.

• Shinshu soba is in all four Nagano areas (Azumino, Hakuba, Karuizawa, Yatsugatake)
• Echizen-gani is in all three Fukui areas (Echizen coast, Tojinbo, Wakasa-Obama)
• White shrimp and firefly squid are in both Toyama areas (Himi, Tateyama)
• Taiza-gani and rock oysters are in both Kyoto areas (Amanohashidate, Kyotango)
• Potatoes and dairy are in both Hokkaido areas (Biei, Niseko)

This is not terrain; it is us having divided the areas finely. There are no borders inside a prefecture, so wherever you stay in Nagano, soba is the speciality.

Put the other way round, if you are after one speciality you are not limited to one area. You need not reach the Echizen coast for Echizen-gani: all three Fukui areas list it.

Only 19% say when

Sixty-four of the 342 notes (19%) mention a season.

Season	Items
Winter	26
Summer	17
Autumn	12
Spring	9

Winter leads, which follows from nine crabs and three winter yellowtail. It also means winter stays are the easiest to choose by what you will eat.

For the middle of October, the entries come to these.

• Mantis shrimp in Otaru: “an autumn taste from Ishikari Bay”
• Okesa persimmons on Sado: “seedless, a Sado speciality, meltingly sweet, a taste of autumn”
• Nara persimmons in Yoshino and Kurotaki: “from Nara, one of the country’s great producers”
• Apples in Minakami: “and in autumn you can pick them yourself”
• Tsumagoi highland cabbage in Kita-Karuizawa: “summer-autumn cabbage grown above a thousand metres”
• Spiny lobster in Shimoda and Minami-Izu: “an autumn and winter taste”

The other 81% say nothing about season. Whether that means available year-round or simply not worth writing down, the notes do not tell us.

What you can buy, and what you eat out

Of the 321 private villas, 221 have a kitchen. So buying the local speciality and cooking it is a trip you can take.

The specialities come in three kinds, though.

• Ingredients you can buy and cook: kuruma prawns, sea urchin, octopus, apples, Awaji onions, fresh wasabi
• Dishes you eat out: keihan (Amami), takanameshi and dago-jiru (Aso), Asuka-nabe (Asuka), persimmon-leaf sushi (Yoshino), Shinshu soba, Takayama ramen
• Things you take home: brown-sugar shochu, carbonated senbei (Arima), onsen manju, Shinshu miso, Nara pickles

If you mean to cook, you are choosing an area whose speciality is an ingredient. Where soba or a rice bowl or a hotpot is the local name, the kitchen may go unused.

And one night is only 19 hours. Arrive at three, go out for the shopping, and you get two meals: dinner and breakfast. Four specialities in an area does not mean four meals. Unless, as in the trip that starts with the shopping, the buying itself is the point.

You are eating the name of a port

You eat snow crab and say you ate Echizen-gani.

A speciality turned out to be an animal with a place name stuck to it. The next prefecture lands the same thing. It lands it, but the name is different, so it feels like something else.

I would not call that a mistake. The same crab, landed at a different port, leaves a different memory of where you were. Matsuba-gani at Kinosaki and Echizen-gani on the Echizen coast are one crab and two journeys.

There are 342 specialities across 85 areas not because there are 342 different animals, but because there are 342 different places.

• No pools in Hokkaido, no onsen in Okinawa: what decides the facilities is the land
• The trip that starts with the shopping: port towns and a villa table
• One night is nineteen hours: the checkout hour decides your morning
• Where in Japan the private stays are: the distribution of 654