There is pressed mackerel sushi on the table when you sit down, and rolled sushi, and boiled eggs, and nobody brought any of it out for you. They were already there. You eat them while you wait, or while you eat the noodles, or afterwards, and at the end you tell the cashier how many you had.

The soup is pork bone and soy sauce. Some shops push the soy forward and some push the pork, and the town divides into those two camps with a firmness that outsiders find difficult to follow. The noodles are thin and straight. A slice of fish cake with a spiral set into it sits on top.

The soy-forward camp is called shakomae-kei, after the tram depot. There was a streetcar line running through the city, the district in front of its depot was the busy part of town in the years just after the war, and the stalls there are where this began. The trams are long gone. The name outlived the rails.

Eating your sushi before your noodles arrive looks like the wrong order of events, and strictly it is. It is also an intelligent use of eight minutes, and once you have done it in a room full of people doing exactly the same thing, the logic becomes quite hard to argue with.