In 1706 the lord Sengoku Masaaki was transferred from Ueda in Shinshu to Izushi, and brought soba craftsmen with him. That is where the account starts, and it explains why a town in Tajima eats a noodle from the mountains of Nagano.

Around the end of the Edo period, stalls serving it started using teshozara, shallow little salt dishes, because they were easy to carry. Later the dishes became white porcelain from the local Izushi kiln, and each shop has its own painting on them, so which plates arrive is part of what you are looking at. They run about thirteen centimeters across.

Five plates make one serving. There is a local measure beyond that: stack your empty plates, and when the pile reaches the height of a chopstick stood on end, that is a grown man's portion.

The condiments are raw egg, grated yam, spring onion, grated daikon, and wasabi, mixed into the dipping sauce however you want them. The form as it stands now was settled in the late 1950s and early 1960s. There are about forty shops serving it in the town, and some of them will give you a certificate if you get through a set number. The stack of plates is the measurement, and everybody can see it.