In 1635, when the lord Matsudaira Sadayuki was transferred, a man called Nagatoya Ichibei moved with him from Kuwana in Ise to Matsuyama in Iyo, and started making somen there. The business has gone on making it for something over three hundred and eighty years since.

The five colors arrived in 1722. The account of how is specific, and domestic, and very small. The daughter of the eighth-generation Nagatoya Ichizaemon went to pray at Tsubaki shrine, noticed threads of five beautiful colors tangled around her geta, and suggested to her father that somen might be colored the same way.

He tried it. The colored noodles were praised by the eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune, who called them exceptionally refined, and the imperial court issued a rinji describing the five colors as beautiful as Chinese thread. That is a considerable amount of official attention for a change of appearance.

The colors still come from natural materials worked into the dough, plum flesh and matcha among them, and the noodles are still drawn out by hand, which is what gives them their fineness and the particular resistance that hand-stretched somen has against the teeth. None of that changed when the color went in. All of it traces back to a young woman looking down at her own footwear on the way out of a shrine.