Noodles ── Soba
Togakushi Soba
Mountain-shrine noodles bundled into small round nests
A soba that spread as hospitality for pilgrims around the shrines of Togakushi, Nagano. It is served in a distinctive style called bocchi-mori, small round bundles arranged side by side.
- Origin: Nagano Nagano (Togakushi)
- About 190 km northwest of Tokyo
What it's made of
Made around Togakushi Shrine, with noodle thickness and broth varying from shop to shop. A single serving comes as bocchi-mori, several small rounded bundles, each about one bite, arranged neatly in a row on a bamboo tray. Grated spicy daikon is a common accompaniment, and even the number of bundles on the tray shifts slightly by the day, depending on the noodles' thickness and portion. Togakushi's cool climate is also said to be part of what draws out the buckwheat's aroma.
How it's made
Just after boiling, a bite-sized portion of noodles is gathered by hand into a round bundle and set on the tray, one bundle at a time. Each shop has its own feel for the size and arrangement of the bundles. Eating it plain as mizu-soba to savor the aroma is also popular, and finishing with the noodle-cooking water, sobayu, is its own established custom here — some shops let diners stir in the daikon's own juice as they go, so the aroma shifts slightly with every bite.
Why it took this shape
The story goes that it began in the Heian era, when buckwheat flour was prized as portable food for mountain ascetics, and later, once temples passed on noodle-cutting techniques in the Edo period, it spread as a hospitality dish for pilgrims and Togakushi devotees arriving from afar. Bocchi-mori can be read as a way of showing each guest their share clearly, and the style is still loved today for carrying both the shrine's formality and the ascetic tradition's plainness.
Before you go
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Dishes in the same style
- Baniku SobaFrom the Aso area of Kumamoto: hot soba topped with horse meat simmered sweet and salty. It's said to carry the history of a region where horse meat took root as a restorative food for the injured and ill.
- Cha SobaA kawari-soba made by kneading powdered green tea, often matcha, into the buckwheat dough. It takes on a faint green tint along with tea's own aroma. It is said to be one of the playful noodle variations devised during the Bunka-Bunsei era (1804–30), alongside yuzu-flavored soba.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Contrast
- Jindaiji SobaSaid to have begun at Jindai-ji temple in Chofu, Tokyo, where tenant farmers paid rent in buckwheat flour that the temple served to visitors. In the Edo period it was even presented to the shogunate.
- Tomikura SobaA soba from the Tomikura district of Iiyama, Nagano, bound not with wheat flour but with fiber extracted from the leaves of a wild thistle called oyama-bokuchi, a method found nowhere else.
- Teuchi SobaBuckwheat, long grown in Nagano's high, cool land where rice and wheat struggle, is rolled and cut by hand using old techniques like the single-pin round roll. Morning mist at around 700 meters is said to shield the plant from frost, and noted soba towns like Togakushi and Kaida dot the prefecture.
- Oshibori UdonFrom Sakaki, Nagano: udon dipped in the wrung juice of a fiercely hot grated daikon, mixed with Shinshu miso. The sweat-inducing heat is said to be met and rounded off by the miso's mellowness.
Also from Nagano
- Anyoji RamenSaku's miso ramen built around Anyoji miso, held to be the root of Shinshu miso.
- Gudakusan Miso ShiruRoot vegetables like daikon, carrot, and burdock go generously into this everyday miso soup of Nagano. Packing it with vegetables is said to allow less miso overall, and wheat dumplings are sometimes dropped in to make it a meal in itself.
- HangoroshiSticky rice, pounded only halfway to a texture called hangoroshi, is coated in sweet bean paste or roasted soybean flour — eastern Nagano's version of botamochi and ohagi, called one name in spring and the other in autumn, a festive sweet that busy farm households could put together quickly.
- Hitashi MameGreen soybeans are boiled until still faintly crisp, then steeped in a lightly seasoned dashi — a dish of northern and eastern Nagano also made with the saddle-marked kurakake bean, sometimes paired with herring roe as part of New Year's osechi.
- Hoshikabocha no EgomaaeKabocha squash, sliced into strips and sun-dried until brittle, is rehydrated and tossed in ground perilla seed — a preserved dish of the Kinasa area born from the need to keep squash, which spoils easily over winter, also used simmered or as filling for oyaki.
- Hoba MakiRice-flour dough kneaded with hot water wraps sweet bean paste, then steams inside a magnolia leaf — a Kiso festival mochi. With no oak trees in the mountains, magnolia stood in, and locals say the leaf's scent settles in best the next day.