Okinawa soba

The noodle is wheat flour and kansui alkaline water, so it sits closer to ramen than to the buckwheat soba of Tokyo, and it gets a coat of oil after boiling that keeps it firm in the bowl. Around Naha the noodle comes thick and slightly twisted. Up in Nago and the north, shops cut it flat like kishimen, and the OCVB describes the northern broth as darker and heavier on bonito. A good bowl carries sanmainiku (pork belly simmered in soy, sugar and awamori) with a stick of kamaboko fish cake beside it. A few shops still make mokkai soba with lye from the ash of trees such as gajumaru banyan in place of kansui.

Noodles reached the Ryukyu court from Fujian in southern China as food for visiting envoys. The street bowl began in the middle of the Meiji era, when a Chinese cook opened a shina soba shop in Naha near the Tsuji pleasure quarter, and the first written reference dates from 1902. The Battle of Okinawa destroyed most of the shops that wartime shortages had not already closed. The revival ran on the wheat flour that came with the American occupation, and noodle factories selling boiled noodles spread through the 1950s and 1960s.

After reversion in 1972 the name Okinawa soba took hold to tell it apart from mainland buckwheat soba. In 1976 the Fair Trade Commission ruled that a noodle without buckwheat could not be sold as soba, and the Okinawa noodle cooperative spent two years and eight months negotiating an exemption. The commission approved Honba Okinawa soba on 17 October 1978 under a written standard for the flour, the water, the kansui, the noodle thickness and the oil finish. The cooperative declared that date Okinawa Soba Day in 1997, and the name became a regional collective trademark in 2006.