Tachikawa Ramen and Udon Guide: Ramen Square and Noodle History

Neighbours called Musashino udon

Tachikawa lies almost at the centre of Tokyo and borders eight cities. Two of them — Kodaira to the northeast and Musashimurayama to the northwest — have udon recognised as “100-Year Foods” by the Agency for Cultural Affairs. Both were chosen in fiscal 2021, in the Traditional 100-Year Food category for local dishes handed down since the Edo period, under the name “the udon culture of the Musashino region.”

One is Kodaira’s kate udon. According to the agency, locally grown wheat flour, called jiko, is kneaded with salt water, firmed by treading on it three times, shaped into a ball and left to rest. To push the air out of the ball once its surface turns glossy, it is kneaded in a “chrysanthemum” pattern, then trodden on once more, and finally rolled out with a rolling pin. It may be called hand-made udon, but the hardest-working part of the body may be the feet. Udon made with local flour is slightly yellowish, and placing on top the trimmed ends of the dough — the so-called “ears” of the udon — is proof that it is hand-made.

The origin of the name is lovely. Seasonal vegetables such as boiled daikon and komatsuna (Japanese mustard spinach), served alongside on a small plate, are called kate, “provisions.” They were added so that people would not eat too much of the precious udon, and they made up nutrition and a feeling of fullness, the agency writes. The vegetables were the udon’s guards. As someone born in an age when you can eat as much udon as you like, I find myself sitting up a little straighter in front of that guarding side plate.

The other is Musashimurayama’s Murayama kate udon. This, in the old days, was everyday food in farming households. Brown or grey noodles containing the bran of red wheat are chilled in cold water, dipped in a warm soy-flavoured broth, and eaten with kate, boiled local vegetables. For the kate, komatsuna, which is grown in large quantities even by Tokyo standards, is joined by spinach or aubergine depending on the season. In recent years, “nikujiru udon,” with pork belly added to the dipping broth, has become standard. The agency’s description goes so far as to say that fans “complete” all the shops in Musashimurayama, enjoying the differences in flavour. The word “complete,” like a collector filling an album, does not often turn up in a document of the national cultural administration.

The culture of wheat does not simply run east and west on either side of Tachikawa. The Ministry of Agriculture’s “Our Regional Cuisine” lists Okutama’s noshikomi udon as a Tokyo dish. Okutama has the steepest mountains in Tokyo and is unsuited to rice paddies, so wheat and buckwheat became the main crops and a culture of flour — eating udon and soba — took root, it explains. Broad, freshly made noodles and seasonal vegetables are simmered in a broth of dried sardines and shiitake. It was a dish that could be served quickly and hot to men coming home cold and hungry after work in the mountains. Some areas call it zuridashi udon, because you drag it out of the pot as you eat, and until around 1975 boar or deer caught in hunting sometimes went in too. Tokyo udon, all of it: deep in the mountains, wild boar goes in; at banquets on the plateau, it is served in lacquer bowls. Look north, and the Saitama entry on the same site calls Saitama one of the country’s great udon kingdoms, second in the nation for udon production, and says that wheat was once widely grown there as a second crop after rice.

From the mountains, from the plain to the north, and from both of Tachikawa’s neighbours, you hear stories of wheat. Tachikawa stood in the middle of a culture of flour.

Tachikawa noodles in numbers

• 1737 — the year the Shibasaki branch channel was drawn from the Tamagawa Aqueduct. This water turned the waterwheels of Shibasaki village.
• 2005 — the year Ramen Square began its Ramen Tryout. Since then, a building by the station has been a gateway for chefs.
• 20 — the number of shop owners who opened here through the tryouts and other routes and then “graduated” (according to the official website).
• 1,000,000 — yen. The opening gift for the tryout winner. The cooking equipment is there from day one.
• 3 — the number of times the dough for Kodaira’s kate udon is trodden on. Since it is trodden once more at the end, the feet are called on four times in all.
• 6 — the number of pizzas that appeared in Tachikawa in 1965 and vanished, requested by almost nobody.

A wayfarer’s quiz

According to Tachikawa Monogatari, roughly how much did a bowl of udon cost in Tokyo around 1965? (A) about 50 yen, (B) about 100 yen, (C) about 250 yen. The answer comes at the end.

For those curious about that last number, let me take a short detour here.

The pizza a soba shop made too soon

Tachikawa Monogatari vol. 5 has a small column called “Tachikawa Leftover Tales.” In it is the story of a soba noodle shop that once stood at the South Exit of Tachikawa Station.

The soba shop hung out its noren curtain in 1931, the year after the South Exit opened. There were few places to eat at the South Exit then, and the shop did a roaring trade. After the war, its owner opened a whole range of businesses besides the soba shop, including the kitchen of a wedding hall and a small restaurant. Raising a noren at the newly opened back exit of the station, coming through the war, and taking on the kitchens of the town’s banquets: the food strata of Tachikawa’s South Exit were built up from one shop’s business after another, like this.

At the words “the kitchen of a wedding hall,” I stopped. As we have seen, from the late 1950s banquets moved from homes to wedding halls, and the groups that shared tableware came to the end of their role. The wedding kitchen where village men stood in a row cutting udon moved, in time, into the kitchen of a wedding hall — and that kitchen was taken on by a shop that had been serving soba by the station. In Tachikawa’s South Exit, the soba shop and the wedding were linked like a thin noodle. One of those threads was a Western-style restaurant that opened on the first basement floor of the new annex of the Tokyo Metropolitan Agricultural Hall in Shibasaki-cho 3-chome when it was completed in 1965.

The menu drafted at the planning stage lists six kinds of “pizza.” They were authentic ones, using pepperoni and anchovies, and priced a little higher than the other dishes. The proposal, apparently, came from the head chef who had been put in charge of the kitchen. But because nobody knew what kind of dish it was, there were few orders, and it was taken off the menu soon after opening, becoming a phantom item, the newsletter writes.

I love this story. A business that started as a soba shop bet on a pizza nobody had heard of, in a basement at the South Exit. And it was magnificently too early. Half a century on, pizza is ordered in every town. Every now and then, Tachikawa steps a pace ahead of its time and is left waiting there alone.

The same newsletter supplies figures for comparison. In Tokyo at that time, curry rice cost about 100 yen. The price of udon I will save for the quiz answer at the end.

Back to noodles. Tachikawa has some new noodle faces, too. Tachikawa is number one in Tokyo for production of Tokyo udo (a white vegetable grown in underground pits — no relation to udon noodles, despite the name), and according to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government’s guide to regional products, restaurants in the city have come up with dishes using udo, such as udo ramen. A white vegetable grown in a pit three metres underground turns up even in a bowl of ramen. Noodles in this city seem to be a vessel that will accept anything the land produces.

Now it is time to answer the riddle of the wedding udon.

Festive-day udon, and the gateway by the station

Why was the celebratory tray in Tachikawa udon?

Half the answer lies in the soil. The Kanto loam plateau was unsuited to paddies, and water arrived only with the branch channels. On land where rice could not be grown as people wished, they grew wheat and milled it with waterwheels turned by the branch channels. If you needed a grain to entertain a crowd of guests, it was wheat.

But that alone does not explain why it was a feast. In neighbouring Musashimurayama, the Agency for Cultural Affairs says, udon was everyday farm food. How does something you eat every day become the star of a festive day?

The other half, I think, lies in effort, in vessels, and in numbers of people. Udon means kneading flour, treading it, resting it, rolling it and cutting it. For dozens of guests, it becomes work for a row of men cutting together. And it is served on lacquer trays bought jointly by the group, with kiridame boxes and yuto pitchers made for udon. As Tachikawa’s city history put it, “not the everyday one soup and one side dish, but in the tray style”: what made it a feast was less the udon itself than the hands of the people who gathered for it and the vessels everyone had looked after together. And as the guarding side plate of Kodaira’s kate udon tells us, udon was also so precious that you were not supposed to eat too much.

One more thing. The tableware was bought jointly so that rich and poor households would not stand out at the banquet. The same udon, cut by the same hands, served in the same lacquer bowls. That night, in front of the trays, guests from well-off houses and guests from poorer ones slurped the same bowl. In rice country, the gap between a household that can cook mountains of white rice and one that cannot would show on the tray at once. But with udon made by everyone from the wheat in the fields, a gap is hard to create. Tachikawa’s festive udon, I think, may have been both a feast and a form of village equality. That is what I thought when I read the newsletter’s phrase “the growth of a sense of self-government and equality.” Beyond that, I leave it to the reader.

Seen this way, the Ramen Square by the station looks a little different. Shops gathered from all over Japan stand side by side, and a new owner chosen by open audition hangs out a noren in place of an existing shop. Customers sit before their bowls and size up this year’s newcomer. Just as the members of a group once brought out their trays and bowls to serve udon, a building by the station now holds a feast of noodles almost every day.

Then: the men of the tableware association stood in a row, cutting udon for a wedding. Now: a chef chosen by open audition serves bowls to each day’s customers, on the third floor of a building by the station.

Tachikawa has always been a town where people gather around noodles.

To anyone who thought Tachikawa had no famous noodles, I have two things to say. In this city, udon closed the wedding feast, and villages put together lacquer vessels for it. And today, on the third floor of a building two minutes from the station, a gateway for ramen chefs has been open for more than twenty years. The city I had thought of as plain turned out, where noodles are concerned, to be the real thing through and through.

One train from Shinjuku on the Chuo Line, one from Kawasaki on the Nambu Line. On a weekend, size up this year’s newcomer at lunchtime at the gateway two minutes from the station, and in the afternoon follow the branch channels across the plateau where the wedding udon was born. For a noodle lover’s day out, it is hard to write a better script.

On the display shelves of the Tonogaya community hall, the pitchers that once poured broth at weddings are still quietly waiting for the next banquet.

Quiz answer

The answer is (A), about 50 yen. According to Tachikawa Monogatari vol. 5, in Tokyo in 1965 a bowl of udon typically cost about 50 yen and curry rice about 100 yen (based on the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications’ Retail Price Survey). Two bowls of udon for one plate of curry. The phantom pizza cost a little more than that.

Before you go

• From central Tokyo and Kanagawa: Tachikawa Station is one train from Shinjuku on the JR Chuo Line. A Tokyo Metropolitan Government Bureau of Environment walking guide gives the journey from Shinjuku to Tachikawa on the Chuo Line as 30 minutes. From Kanagawa, the JR Nambu Line links Kawasaki Station and Tachikawa Station with no change of trains.
• Ramen Square: 3F Alearea 2, 3-6-29 Shibasaki-cho, Tachikawa, Tokyo. Connected by pedestrian deck to the South Exit of JR Tachikawa Station and to Tachikawa-Minami Station on the Tama Toshi Monorail; about 1–2 minutes’ walk from the deck (according to the official website). The shops, opening hours and menus change, so check the official site: https://ramen-square.com/
• How the Ramen Tryout works (Japanese): https://ramen-square.com/tryout
• To learn more about Tachikawa’s wedding udon and shared tableware: Tachikawa Monogatari vol. 20 (September 2025), readable in the Comprehensive Database of Archaeological Site Reports in Japan (Japanese): https://sitereports.nabunken.go.jp/143837
• Tachikawa City History and Folklore Museum: 3-12-34 Fujimi-cho, Tachikawa. Opened in 1985, it holds much of the shared tableware donated by the city’s tableware associations (according to the table in Tachikawa Monogatari vol. 20). Check the exhibits, opening days and hours on the City of Tachikawa’s official site. The museum is also on the city’s walking course “Walking the Old Village” (Japanese): https://www.city.tachikawa.lg.jp/kanko/bunka/1004244/1004848/1004889.html
• To eat Musashino udon in the neighbouring towns where it comes from: Agency for Cultural Affairs, “100-Year Foods” list for Tokyo (Kodaira kate udon, Murayama kate udon; Japanese): https://www.bunka.go.jp/seisaku/shokubunka/foodculture/hyakunenfood/jirei/list_tokyo.html
• Walking times: Ramen Square is about two minutes from the station. If you head further from the South Exit, Suwa Shrine, closely linked to the Shibasaki branch channel, is a 10-minute walk from JR Tachikawa Station (according to the shrine’s official access information), and the Nekawa green path is about 15 minutes’ walk from the South Exit.
• Combine it with: Have lunch at Ramen Square at the South Exit, walk to Fusai-ji Temple and Suwa Shrine in Shibasaki-cho, then follow the Nekawa green path down to the Tama River — a route that traces the “water” behind the noodles. From winter to spring, you could also look for Tokyo udo in Sunagawa to the north. Farmers’ Center Minore Tachikawa (2-1-5 Sunagawa-cho, Tachikawa) is about 20 minutes by bus from bus stop No. 2 at the North Exit of JR Tachikawa Station; get off at Sunagawa Gosaro and walk 2–3 minutes (according to JA Tokyo Midori). The strip-shaped village plots along the Tamagawa Aqueduct and Sunagawa are nearby, too.
• Practical tips: Carry an IC transport card such as Suica or PASMO. Many ramen shops in Japan take orders through a ticket machine at the entrance: buy your ticket first, then hand it to the staff. Shops and menus change, so check before you go.

After your noodles, at the North Exit of Tachikawa Station

Once your ramen bowl is empty, cross from the South Exit through the station’s free passage to the North Exit. One minute’s walk away, on the third floor of the Etoile Building at 2-14-10 Akebonocho, Tachikawa, is On the Shore Tachikawa (オンザショア立川店), a hot yoga studio heated by lava-stone plates.

It also offers room-temperature yoga, Pilates, women-only kickboxercise, boxercise, HIIT and personal training, with more than 25 kinds of yoga lesson.

It is open every day from 8:00 to 23:30. If you had ramen for lunch, you can leave a little time and join an evening lesson.

For first-timers there is a trial yoga lesson for ¥1,980 including tax, with two bath towels, one face towel and a yoga mat included in the rental.

Pregnant guests cannot take part in lava-stone hot yoga, but room-temperature maternity yoga is available. Many of our yoga instructors speak English, and the studio’s owner, Naomi Fujita, who holds Japan’s top English qualification (Eiken Grade 1) and a perfect TOEIC score and once worked as a translator and overseas interpreter at Nomura Securities, and who lived in Alaska for three years, often helps guests from the US bases in English herself (visitors from abroad have even left Google reviews about the care they received in English); if you would like an English-friendly lesson, just say so when you book.

Studio information: https://ontheshore.jp/ — trial lesson booking: https://site.locaop.jp/C0aVK?_src=hp

The hands that cut the wedding udon and the hands that make noodles by the station work on the same plateau. In Tachikawa, noodles have always started in somebody’s hands.

Cover photo: Musashino udon: thick noodles with a meat dipping broth and tempura (at a shop in Saitama, not taken in Tachikawa). (Photo: Ocdp / CC0 / Wikimedia Commons)

Information as of October 2026.

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