A small bowl arrives with a single mouthful of buckwheat noodles in it. You eat, and before you have quite swallowed, the next one lands. This continues until you put the lid on your bowl, which is the only way to stop it.

Wanko is a dialect word for a small wooden bowl. The dish is known now as a contest, and Morioka and Hanamaki both keep the tradition and both hold an annual championship, with counters kept and records posted on the wall. The older explanation is more domestic. It was a way of serving a crowd from one small kitchen, a little at a time, so that everyone ate while the noodles were still fresh from the water. The server stands at your shoulder and calls out as she pours. Alongside sit the garnishes, more of them than you expect: tuna sashimi, grated yam, mushrooms in vinegar, minced chicken.

It is not, if we are honest, a way of tasting anything slowly. Somewhere after the fifteenth bowl you notice you have begun counting your neighbour's stack rather than your own, and at that moment the point of the thing arrives.

Which of the two towns invented it has never been settled, and there is a story about a lord stopping at Hanamaki castle and asking for bowl after bowl. This is less a meal than a game played by everyone at the table, and the rules are learned in about a minute. The lid is yours to close, whenever you like, and no one at the table will think less of you for closing it early.