The noodles are the whole argument. Instead of being boiled after steaming, they are loosened, cooled quickly, and coated in oil, which drives the moisture down and leaves a springiness that survives a very hot pan. Four noodle makers inside Fujinomiya city supply them. Everything else in the dish follows from the fact that these noodles will not go soft.

The other two signatures both began as things nobody wanted. Nikukasu is what is left over after lard has been pressed from pork back fat, and it went into the pan in an era when actual pork was beyond most household budgets. Dashiko is sardine shavings that broke down into powder during production or transport along the Suruga Bay ports of Yui and Kanbara, unsellable as shavings, perfectly good sprinkled over noodles.

So the two flavors people travel here for are both salvage. That is not a hardship story exactly. It is closer to a habit of looking at the byproduct pile and asking what it tastes like.

In 2000 a group calling itself the Fujinomiya Yakisoba Gakkai, the Yakisoba Society, was formed and began pushing the name outward. The name traveled. What it carries is a plate of noodles built from the parts of the pig and the fish that the rest of the country was throwing away.