Rafute

Ryukyu cooking is said to begin and end with the pig, and rafute is its most formal pork dish. The cook singes the skin, boils the whole slab for about an hour and a half, cools it in the broth and cuts it into cubes of four or five centimetres. The cubes then simmer slowly in bonito dashi, awamori and sugar, with the soy sauce added in two rounds, until the fat has rendered out and the skin gives under a chopstick. Kokuto black sugar often stands in for white sugar, and some cooks add miso.

The name is written 羅火腿 and comes from Chinese, and Japanese Wikipedia links the dish to dongpo pork, which also keeps its skin on. Pork culture grew in the Ryukyu Kingdom through its exchange with China, and MAFF notes that the meat taboos of mainland Japan reached Okinawa without taking root, so pork still appears at memorial services. Rafute began as a keeping food for a hot climate, strongly salty-sweet, and it could last about a month. Today's versions taste milder.

Restaurants serve it as a single large piece, sometimes with a few threads of ginger, apart from the sliced sanmainiku that tops soba. Yunangi in Kumoji pairs it with a miso sauce, and the court-cuisine houses Mie and Ryotei Naha put it in their set courses. Supermarkets and souvenir shops sell it in retort pouches.