The noodles are about three times the thickness of ordinary ones. The toppings are pork and bean sprouts. That is all of it. Lard in the pan, a heavy sauce, and shichimi shaken over the top at the table, which is described as the way people here do it.

The reason for the thickness is stated plainly. Around fifty years ago it was devised for people doing physical work: cheap, substantial, and slow to leave you hungry. Namie at the time ran on farming, fishing, and forestry, and those are the appetites it was built for.

An izakaya near Namie station on the Joban line is credited with starting to serve it with extra-thick noodles in 1955, and the town took it up from there until it was simply what yakisoba meant locally.

In 2008 younger members of the town's chamber of commerce formed a group to promote it. Three years later the entire town became an evacuation zone after the disaster, and the members of that group were scattered across the country with no town to go back to. They kept the thing going anyway, cooking it wherever they had ended up, and in 2013 it was chosen at the national event. Everything about Namie changed. The width of the noodle did not.