Gunma gets long winter daylight and a dry wind, and wheat does well in those conditions, so a culture built on flour grew up here. Production runs to around twenty-two thousand two hundred tonnes, sixth in the country. The prefecture has its own varieties, Satonosora and Yumekaori, and regional brands like Hyakunen Komugi and Kinunonami.

Western noodles took hold in Takasaki through the late 1960s and early 1970s. A restaurant called Shango, which opened in 1968 and now has seven branches in the prefecture, is credited with spreading the habit through the town.

What marks the local style is not a sauce or an ingredient. It is the size of the plate.

At that restaurant a small is a hundred and fifty grams and a medium is two hundred, against the hundred grams that a specialist restaurant would normally serve, so the starting point here is already larger than most places' finish. There are said to be around a hundred and fifty pasta restaurants in the city, which is a great many for the population. Since 2009 an annual event has been held where visitors eat and vote. In some years more than ten thousand people have come to it. A wheat-growing province, covered in Italian plates.