The noodles are straight and flat, and the broth is built on bonito, which makes it lighter than the pork-heavy soups of the main island. On top of the bowl: nothing at all. Slices of three-layer pork belly and kamaboko are certainly in the bowl, but they have been buried underneath the noodles rather than arranged neatly over the top of them.

Why that is done at all is not settled. One account I read attributes it to a local aesthetic, a preference for a bowl that looks clean and uncluttered when it reaches the table.

Another explanation, repeated widely, ties it to taxation: hiding the toppings made the bowl look poor, and looking poor mattered a great deal in a place where the tax burden was set by what people appeared to have. A third says it simply keeps the surface of the meat from drying out.

The pages I opened disagreed with each other on this, so I am going to leave it open here. What is certain is only the physical fact of the bowl itself. You are given a bowl that looks like plain noodles sitting in plain broth, and you do not find out what is actually in it until your chopsticks go down through the surface and hit something solid.