The deity of Omiwa Shrine is held to be the guardian of somen-making. The story is that a man received a divine instruction, grew wheat on this ground, and made the first somen here. Whether or not that is how it happened, this is a place where a noodle's origin is kept by a shrine rather than by a family or a guild.

It is made in the coldest part of the year, and only then. Wheat dough is stretched by hand, repeatedly, and hung to dry, and the drawing-out only works in air that is cold and dry — in humid weather the strands break as they thin. So it is produced in midwinter and eaten in midsummer, six months apart.

The grades are set by thickness, and there were traditionally four of them. The finest is called kamisugi, sacred cedar; the ordinary grade is homare, meaning honour. Even the vocabulary of the price list comes out of the shrine.

They hold. The noodles keep their firmness and do not collapse when boiled. In summer they are chilled; in winter they go into hot broth as nyumen. A food judged by how thin it can be drawn, which is then valued for not breaking at that thinness — that sounds like a contradiction, and it is precisely the skill.