Gunma has long farmed rice and wheat in double cropping, so wheat flour has always been plentiful here. Suiton comes out of that, and so do okkirikomi and manju.

The other half of the explanation is about who ate what, and it is not a comfortable one. A farming household ate rice on the days that mattered, and there were not many of them. The rest of the time it ate wheat, in one form or another, every day.

The method is barely a method. Wheat flour is kneaded with water, and the dough is dropped into the pot by the spoonful, into stock already carrying daikon, carrot, and taro, and the whole thing is seasoned with mirin and soy sauce.

The names are where it gets interesting. In Fujioka it is totchanage-jiru, and there are two explanations: that you take the batter and throw it, tocha-nage, or that it is what the father of the house makes while stirring the pot. Elsewhere it is tsumerikko, otsuyu dango, nejikko. In Ota they often use rice flour instead. It was food for the years when rice was short, and it is served in school lunches across the prefecture now, which is a long way from where it started. The same soup, under a different name in every valley.