Kitakata

A city of 45,000 people in the Aizu basin with about 120 ramen shops in it, which is the highest density anywhere in Japan and the reason most visitors come. Kitakata ramen is one of the three styles usually named alongside Sapporo and Hakata: flat, wide, distinctly curly noodles with a high water content, in a clear soy-based broth built on pork bones and dried sardines.

The local custom is asa-ra, morning ramen. Shops open at seven and are full by half past with people eating a bowl before work. It began with farmers and textile workers coming off night shifts and it never stopped. Eating ramen at breakfast in a town where everyone else is doing the same is a genuinely different experience from eating it at lunch.

The other Kitakata is the storehouses. There are around 4,000 kura here, built of brick or clay-covered timber, used for sake, miso, soy sauce, tools and in some cases as houses. Prosperity from the sake trade paid for them and a local saying held that a man was not a man until he had built one. Several are open, several are shops, and one brewery has turned a row of them into a tour that ends with tasting.

The sake is worth taking seriously. Aizu rice and Iide mountain water make a clean, dry style, and half a dozen breweries in town will pour for visitors.

From Aizu-Wakamatsu it is fifteen minutes by train. In summer and autumn the Banetsu Monogatari steam locomotive runs the line from Niigata, which is the enjoyable way to arrive.