The noodles do not match each other. They vary in thickness and in length from one to the next, they are short, and they are soft all the way through. There is no chew in them at all, which in a country that argues seriously about udon texture reads at first like a failure.

The broth is a light one drawn from dried sardines and nothing heavier. The toppings are scallion and chopped fried tofu. That is the entire dish, and nothing else is permitted to go on top of it.

Naruto was salt field country from the domain period until the late twentieth century, vast flats worked by hand. The account given for the noodles is that they were served to the laborers doing that work, and that they were made soft and short quite deliberately, so that they could be eaten quickly and without any effort at all.

So the missing chew is not carelessness. It is the specification. In the 2000s a photographer from the prefecture, Nakano Koji, named the style naru-churu and published a book of that title, and the nickname stuck to the thing itself. Churu-churu is the sound of noodles going in, and small children can manage a whole bowl of these unaided, which was always more or less the idea.