The binder is funori, a seaweed. It was not chosen for the kitchen. In the Uonuma district, where ramie weaving was the local industry, funori was used to size the warp threads on the loom, and it happened to be in every house. Somebody put it into buckwheat dough instead. That is the whole of the invention.

The hegi is the vessel: a shallow rectangular tray built from thin planks of wood. The noodles are laid into it in small coils, one mouthful each, drawn up by hand and set down in rows. The gesture involved is said to come from the way thread is wound off a reel, which is either a good story or a true one, and possibly both. The action has its own name here, tefuri, borrowed straight from the weaving shed.

In the mouth it is slippery and slightly springy, closer to something else than to the buckwheat of Tokyo. It arrives cold. There is more of it than the tray suggests, and people underestimate this consistently.

Tokamachi and Ojiya have each registered their own trademark for it. One noodle, two towns, standing side by side and naming it separately. Nobody involved seems to regard this as a problem, and both trays look the same when they arrive.