Tazukuri (田作)
Tazukuri (also called tatsukuri) is a dried or cooked product of young anchovies.
It is also called Gomame.
It is made by dressing the dried small fish with soy sauce, sweet cooking rice wine, sugar, and a little red pepper after dry-frying them and cooling them. When it is dressed too much, each fish sticks with each.
It is one of the indispensable dishes for Osechi-ryori (special dishes prepared for the New Year), especially for Iwaizakana sansyu (three kinds of celebrating dishes) of Kanto-Style.
Since sardines were used as high-grade fertilizer for the fields, people eat them to wish for good harvest. Its another name, Gomame, fifty thousand grains of rice, was based on the fact that the sardine fertilizer produced a good harvest of rice.