Pork bones boiled hard and long enough will surrender what is inside them, and the broth turns opaque white. The accepted origin is an accident: a shop in Kurume in 1947 left the pot on the fire too long. What came out of the mistake was kept, and the region has been making it that way ever since.

The noodle is pale, straight and very thin, closer to a fine somen than to anything Chinese. You specify how it is boiled. Barikata, kata, futsu, yawa: hard, firm, normal, soft, with a further gradation at each end for people who care. One shop's survey found eight customers in ten asking for firm.

The extra portion of noodles, kaedama, came from the Nagahama district by the fish market. Traders ate between auctions and needed something that arrived immediately and finished quickly. Thin and firm is what that requirement looks like on a plate.

The street stalls are still there, on the river in Nakasu and around Tenjin, open into the small hours. You sit beside a stranger under a plastic sheet and hold the same kind of bowl. It is the ordinary end of a night out, and the food has been shaped by that as much as by the pigs. Nobody lingers, and nobody is expected to.