Stock drawn from beef bones, joined to soy sauce. It has existed in the central and western parts of Tottori since the late 1940s, and the prefecture's own tourism material makes two claims about it that are worth separating.

The first is that beef bone is a rare base for ramen anywhere in Japan. The second, which is the more interesting one, is that the shops serving it are clustered in one region rather than scattered, which for a ramen style is unusual.

There is an account of how the clustering happened. A noodle manufacturer went around the restaurants of the area teaching them how to make the beef bone soup. A company whose business was selling noodles gave away the recipe for the liquid the noodles sit in, and by doing so created a regional style that guaranteed demand for its own product. Whether that was the intention or not, it worked.

More than sixty shops across the prefecture serve it now. In the bowl it is toasty in a way that pork stock never manages to be, faintly sweet underneath that, and considerably lighter on the tongue than the color of it suggests. I was not paying much attention to any of this, and then the bowl in front of me was empty.