It began at the gate of Mizusawa temple, served to people who had come to worship. There is a tradition that a monk who had come over from Goryeo, and who lent his efforts to founding the temple back in the Asuka period, was the one who taught the method of making udon in this place.

The form it took is dated to around 1576, when noodles cut from local wheat and the spring water of Mizusawa were offered to pilgrims and to people staying at the hot springs.

The noodle is on the thin side. It has body and spring to it, and it is white, translucent in places when you lift it out.

Most shops serve it cold on a bamboo tray, which is how you notice the surface of it. What you dip it in varies from shop to shop: some a soy-based sauce, some a sesame one. Along the road below the temple runs a stretch called the Mizusawa udon road, with thirteen shops belonging to the association. The water is the other half of it: local wheat, and the spring water that comes up here, and nothing much besides salt. Four hundred years of selling the same thing in the same place to people on their way to the same temple, and the name of the noodle is now simply the name of the ground it is made on.