The noodle is wide, flat and heavily crimped, and it holds a great deal of water. Rested before cutting, it comes out soft rather than firm, and it parts under the teeth almost without resistance. People who arrive expecting the chew of other regional noodles are usually surprised, sometimes disappointed, and then order it again.

The broth is clear soy, built on pork bone, with dried sardine added in many kitchens as a separate stock and blended in at the end. It does not look like much in the bowl. It is more insistent than it looks.

Some shops open early enough that a bowl of ramen counts as breakfast, and the habit has a name here. Before the municipal mergers, a town of about thirty-seven thousand people supported roughly a hundred and twenty ramen shops. The figure now is nearer ninety, which tells its own story about the population.

Kitakata was known first for its storehouses, the thick-walled kura that line the older streets. The noodles became the reason people came only afterwards, in the nineteen-eighties. Television brought the storehouses to the country in 1975, and the noodles were pushed as a second reason to come. Most visitors assume it happened the other way round.