There are two accounts of how it started. In one, around 1928 a man named Zhang, from Fujian in China, moved to Onomichi, cut his noodles with a length of green bamboo, and sold them from a cart as shina soba. In the other, it begins after the war, in 1947, with Zhu Ajun, from Taiwan, serving chuka soba from a stall.

Zhu later took premises and hung up the sign that read Shukaen. What he served under the name chuka soba was a soy-based broth with flat noodles in it and minced pork back fat scattered over the top, and that combination is what the town has been eating since.

The form it has now settled between the mid-1950s and the mid-1960s.

Chicken frame, with fish from the Inland Sea worked into it, producing a broth that looks clear in the bowl. Some shops build it from chicken, vegetables, and kombu instead. Then the back fat goes over the surface in small pieces, and what arrives is transparent and heavy at the same time, which is the whole trick of the bowl. Shukaen closed its doors in June 2019, after ninety years of the town eating what it started. The taste continues at a shop in Kannabe in Fukuyama, run by someone who trained in that kitchen.