Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum

Opened in 1994 and billed, correctly, as the world's first food-themed amusement park. Upstairs is a small gallery about the history and regional varieties of ramen. Downstairs is the reason to come.

The basement is a full-scale reconstruction of a Tokyo shitamachi street in 1958, the year instant noodles were invented, built across two levels with a painted sunset sky, dim street lamps, a cinema frontage, alley bars, and a level of detail that includes period advertisements and the right kind of rubbish. The light cycles slowly from dusk to night. It is film-set work rather than museum display and it holds up.

In it are around nine ramen shops, each an outpost of an established regional restaurant, and the line-up rotates every few years so a shop from Hokkaido might be replaced by one from Kyushu. Between them they cover miso, tonkotsu, shoyu, shio and whatever the current rotation adds.

Every shop sells a mini-size bowl at about two thirds the price. That is the point: three small bowls from three regions in one sitting is a comparison you cannot make anywhere else in Japan without three train journeys.

Entry is around 450 yen and does not include the ramen. Popular shops have queues at lunchtime; go mid-afternoon.

Shin-Yokohama station is five minutes away on foot and is a Shinkansen stop, which makes this an unusually good way to fill ninety minutes between trains.