Tachikawa Ramen and Udon Guide: Ramen Square and Noodle History

Ramen Square at Tachikawa Station picks new chefs by audition; the old villages served udon as the wedding feast. A guide to Tachikawa’s noodles.

日本語で読む（Japanese version）

At a wedding in Tachikawa, what was the finest dish on the table? Not sea bream. Not white rice. Udon.

I found it written in Tachikawa Monogatari (“Tachikawa Stories”), the newsletter published by the City of Tachikawa’s office for compiling the city’s history, in its September 2025 issue. In Tachikawa, people often ate udon on hare days — the festive, out-of-the-ordinary days of celebration. The feast trays even came with dedicated vessels for holding udon, it said.

To be honest, when I thought of noodles in Tachikawa, I thought of the ramen by the station. Mention a “noodle town” and the first names that come to mind are usually other stations on the JR Chuo Line, and Tachikawa, I felt, stood quietly somewhere toward the back of that queue. But there cannot be many places that chose noodles as the feast dish for their celebrations. Why did the people of Tachikawa — a city in the Tama area, the western half of Tokyo beyond the 23 central wards — slurp udon at their weddings? With that question in mind, I first climbed the stairs at the station’s South Exit.

Ramen Square at Tachikawa Station’s South Exit, the “Broadway of Ramen”

Leave JR Tachikawa Station by the South Exit and the pedestrian deck leads straight into a shopping complex called Alearea. Ramen Square is on the third floor of “Alearea 2.” According to its official website, it is a one- or two-minute walk from the deck. You could call it the nearest gathering place for noodles to the station.

The official website calls the place “a Broadway of ramen, where dedicated craftsmen compete in flavour and skill.” Step inside, it adds, and you can enjoy an atmosphere as if you were visiting a ramen shop in Manhattan. I have no yardstick for comparison. But if you can reach New York in two minutes on foot from Tachikawa’s South Exit, that is a very cheap fare.

The official guide currently lists seven shops — Hokkaido miso, Kumamoto, Wakayama, Kyushu, chicken paitan (a rich, creamy chicken broth) — so the place names on the shop signs alone will carry you down half the Japanese archipelago. The shops change from time to time. What is interesting here is how they change.

Since 2005, Ramen Square has run an open call for new shop owners called the “Ramen Tryout.” According to the organisers’ application guidelines, anyone 18 or over with experience in a ramen shop — that is, with cooking experience — can apply, regardless of age or gender. The first round is a document screening; the second is an interview and a cooking-and-tasting test. The winner is promised a shop at Ramen Square, replacing an existing one. They receive one million yen in cash as an opening gift. The cooking equipment is already in place, and they even get a commercial announcing the opening on the big outdoor screen in front of the station. The shop opens in April of the year after the second round.

The call for entries proudly states that it is held with the full cooperation of a critic known for his ramen-tasting tours, and the names of companies that deal in ramen information are listed as the organisers’ contact. In the first year, 2005, there was a category for opening in spring and another for opening in autumn, and each produced a winner. “Tryout” originally means, in baseball and other sports, the test a team uses to judge a player’s ability before signing them. In Tachikawa, they do it with a bowl. What is tested is the quality of the soup, and instead of a signing bonus there is an opening gift. The guidelines call the place “the hall of fame of Tachikawa ramen.” A hall of fame where membership is fought over again every year by customers’ palates is a rather restless hall of fame.

Why go to such lengths? The guidelines say it is in the hope that famous shops born in Tachikawa will spread their wings across the country. And the official website says that 20 shop owners have opened here so far and “graduated,” growing into famous shops.

The third floor of a building by the station has, over more than twenty years, become a gateway for ramen chefs. A TV audition show ends with a single broadcast. Here, the winner stands in front of real customers every day. The judges are office workers queuing at lunchtime and high-school students on their way home from club activities. There are no harsher judges.

But let me set the ramen aside for now. The question I started with was about udon. Leaving the bustle of Ramen Square behind me, I went back through the documents to the feast tables of old Tachikawa.

Udon on the wedding trays

The feature of Tachikawa Monogatari vol. 20 is “Shared feast trays and bowls in festive scenes, then and now.” Weddings, funerals, ancestral rites and the gatherings of religious confraternities (ko) always came with a hitoyose, a “gathering of people,” in other words a banquet. In the old farming villages, banquets were held at home. Villagers gathered, poured each other sake and ate a feast together. It was a pleasure snatched between farm jobs and a way of confirming your bonds with your neighbours, the newsletter says. So what were “shared trays and bowls”? At occasions such as weddings and memorial services where many people gathered, each guest was served on their own tray, with the food in lacquered bowls. But lacquerware was expensive, and it was hard for one household to own enough for dozens of people. So neighbourhood groups, confraternities, relatives and close friends formed associations and shared trays and bowls for several dozen people. Folklorists call this kyoyu zenwan, “shared trays and bowls,” the newsletter explains.

And in that explanation is this sentence: in Tachikawa, people often ate udon on festive days. The presence among the shared tableware of kiridame, boxes for holding udon and other foods, and yuto, pitchers for pouring the dipping broth, can be called a characteristic of this area.

The villages were jointly buying vessels specifically for udon. I had heard of people assembling equipment for a feast, but this was the first time I had heard of anyone assembling lacquer boxes for noodles.

According to the newsletter, the food at such banquets was served as honzen ryori, the formal style of Japanese cuisine, with rice, soup, side dishes and pickles set on an individual tray for each person. That was why lacquered trays and bowls were needed. So where on this formal tray did the udon sit? The newsletter carries a diagram of how the trays were laid out, from a folklore survey in nearby Hamura City. On the udon tray for a wedding, the udon is heaped in the large lidded bowl; the broth is poured into a small cup or into the lid of the large bowl; the condiments go on a small tray-plate; and the flat bowl holds boiled greens and shredded daikon radish. The chopsticks are round ones of willow. The other diagram shows a rice tray, served mainly at Buddhist rites. Udon for days of celebration, rice for days of mourning. At least in the village of that survey, that was how they were set apart.

Since when had the people of Tachikawa been sharing trays and bowls? A table in the newsletter lists the owners of shared tableware in the city and the dates written on the vessels. The oldest is a wooden box belonging to the Yamanaka confraternity of Fujimi-cho, inscribed 1845. A vessel of the Deguchi group in Shibasaki-cho is dated 1857, and one of the Shimowada group in Nishiki-cho, 1852. The practice started early on the Shibasaki side, in the south; on the Sunagawa side, in the north, it continues from an example of 1874. The newsletter suggests that the boom in silk raising, the opening of the Kobu Railway (today’s Chuo Line) and the founding of Tachikawa Airfield probably played a part. The “Public and Private Diary” left by the village head of Shibasaki also shows that the head’s family donated part of the tableware it had bought for its own use to the group, and everyone used it.

How the tableware was paid for also reveals the character of a place. In one example from the southern Kanto region introduced by the newsletter, a confraternity divided its households into four grades according to their means and assigned each a share of the cost. So that rich and poor households would not stand out from one another at the banquet. The newsletter sees that spirit of mutual aid as the background to the custom. It also says that in villages that farmed dry fields rather than paddies, cash crops spread from the mid-Edo period, raising their economic strength; household fortunes tended to be more even, and it is said to have been easier for them to assemble a set of tableware. The glamorous food culture of the city flowed in, and village farmers too were able to make formal ceremonies and feast trays their own. In this, the newsletter says, one can glimpse a growing sense of self-government and equality.

Systems for pooling money supported shared tableware in other regions too. According to the newsletter, in Toyama Prefecture, at the urging of merchants of Wajima lacquerware and others, “bowl tanomoshi-ko” were formed, and in many cases money circulated through the association so that each household could buy its trays and bowls. A tanomoshi-ko is a mutual-aid scheme in which members pay into a common pot and take turns receiving it. The same issue also introduces a tanomoshi-ko document from Shibasaki village. It is the “Kasshi-ko” of 1864, and its purpose was to raise money to buy weapons and armour. According to the document, a few people in Shibasaki village had already been learning swordsmanship from Kondo Isami — later the leader of the Shinsengumi, the shogunate’s famous police force in Kyoto — but out of a sense of looming war, many more villagers began to train. Through the same mutual-aid system, one region bought bowls and late-Edo Shibasaki tried to buy armour. Either way, it was shopping to protect the village.

Let no household be shamed at the banquet. To that end, everyone buys the tableware together. Reading this passage, I grew a little fond of Tachikawa’s villages. And one phrase stayed with me: villages that farmed dry fields.

From the end of the Edo period, for more than a century. From the late 1950s, as wedding halls and restaurants multiplied, banquets moved out to such venues, and the storehouses that held the shared tableware all but vanished. Today, most of the city’s trays and bowls have been donated to the Tachikawa City History and Folklore Museum, where they sleep.

The cover of the same issue carries a photograph of a dinner, staged in the style of a “wedding,” held in 1981 when the tableware association of the eastern part of the Eighth Group in Saiwai-cho was dissolved. At the head of the room are displayed sake cups tied with ceremonial cords, sake flasks and a lacquered sake keg. First came the snacks to go with the sake, served on footed trays: simmered dishes, burdock kinpira, vinegared dishes and sashimi. After that, rice and udon were served in the large lidded bowls and eaten, the newsletter writes. There is even a cover photograph captioned “Men of the association cutting udon.” What closed the wedding feast was udon cut by the men.

One by one, the city’s tableware associations disappeared. The Tonogaya group in Nishisuna-cho dissolved in 2000 and divided its trays and bowls among its members. But the “wedding sake flasks,” the lacquered keg named yanagidaru — written with characters meaning roughly “much joy in the household” — and the broth pitchers were not divided up; they are displayed with explanations on the shelves of the Tonogaya community hall. The pitchers for pouring udon broth have survived as mementoes of the village.

The newsletter sums up the special quality of these dinners as eating a feast — that is, udon — in the formal tray style, rather than the everyday one soup and one side dish. The content of the feast was udon; what set the tone was the trays and the vessels.

But why udon? Wouldn’t it have been far easier to cook plenty of rice? I was beginning to think so when I remembered the ground under Tachikawa. The answer, it seemed, lay in the soil underfoot.

Growing wheat on a plateau where rice would not grow

The city has designated as a cultural property an old map of Sunagawa, in the north of Tachikawa. It is a plan for creating rice paddies, drawn up in the early Meiji era. But the city’s notes say that, partly because the soil was volcanic Kanto loam that was unsuited to paddies, few paddies were actually made. Only the plan remained, on the map.

Water itself was scarce, too. According to an article by a member of the city-history committee in Tachikawa Monogatari vol. 5, the water table on the Musashino Plateau is low, and people could only live here permanently once branch channels were drawn from the Tamagawa Aqueduct. The branch channels were used not only for drinking and daily water for the new fields and villages, but to water paddies and power waterwheels.

There is a branch channel in the south of Tachikawa, on the Shibasaki side, too. A Tama River walking map made by the Keihin River Office of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism records that the Shibasaki branch was drawn from the Tamagawa Aqueduct in 1737 and long used for Shibasaki village’s waterwheels and daily water. As for the aqueduct’s network of branches, the record of a lecture on the Tamagawa Aqueduct notes that waterwheels were built throughout the Tama area and used for polishing rice, milling flour and textiles. When the waterwheel turns, wheat becomes flour. When it becomes flour, it becomes udon.

The handwork of growing wheat is still being recorded today. According to Tachikawa Monogatari vol. 16, in early June 2023 the folklore and local-geography section of the city-history committee, with the help of the Nishi-Sunagawa Torch Tradition Preservation Society and others, recorded the harvesting of wheat. In early July they also recorded bo-uchi, threshing in the old way with a flail called a kururi-bo, performed by the Sunagawa District Traditional Folk Song Preservation Society. The previous issue’s activity report includes oral accounts of mugifumi and threshing as well.

Mugifumi, “wheat treading,” is the work of treading on newly sprouted wheat with your feet through the winter. Trodden wheat puts down roots and is kept from being heaved up by frost. To the north, in Saitama, a man named Gonda Aizo devoted himself to developing cultivation methods, including wheat treading, that raised wheat yields four- to fivefold, writes the Ministry of Agriculture’s page on regional home cooking. Wheat is trodden on in the field, and then, once it becomes flour, it is trodden on again. No crop has a closer relationship with human feet than Musashino wheat. In the Reiwa era, the people making the city’s history books are earnestly filming hands harvesting wheat. Picturing that scene made me a little happy. History survives not only on the timeline but in a stooping posture.

If you cannot grow rice, grow wheat. Grow wheat, mill it, knead it, roll it, cut it. On this plateau, the grain you could pour your effort into was wheat.

Here the phrase “villages that farmed dry fields” connects. Villages on a plateau unsuited to paddies made their living from fields. In the newsletter’s view, it was precisely such dry-field villages that gained strength from cash crops from the mid-Edo period and could jointly assemble lacquer trays and bowls. Wheat from the fields became udon, and money earned from the fields became lacquer bowls. The banquets of villages with no rice made up for the missing rice by setting the tone with the produce of their fields. Tachikawa’s soil was cold toward rice paddies, but it was surprisingly generous toward the banquet table.

So what shape did that wheat take in the surrounding towns? Tachikawa’s neighbours have two kinds of udon with the national government’s seal of approval.