Part guesthouse and tour provider and part culture and cooking class, Udon House is a full-immersion experience where guests learn about the Sanuki region where udon noodles were born.
It’s early morning in Mitoyo, a small town in Kagawa Prefecture in Shikoku. The sun casts squares of light on the long tables of Udon House where Kanako Harada is preparing to welcome a group of guests from Switzerland and Japan.
Udon House is hard to define. Part guesthouse and tour provider and part culture and cooking class, it’s a full-immersion experience where guests learn about the Sanuki region where udon noodles were born.
Helping Harada prepare are Nobuchika Higashida, a Kagawa native and chief sales officer of Sanuki Menki Co., Ltd and Aino Horii, Harada’s high school friend and invaluable assistant on the Udon House project.
As Harada and Higashida discuss the plan for today’s group of guests at one of the tables, Horii is busy in the adjoined kitchen, stirring pots of steaming dashi and feeding fresh dough through a seimenki (noodle-making) machine.
Harada, Osaka-born but raised in Sapporo, is a former consultant for Rakuten Travel where she focused on promoting rural areas of Japan. Understandably, she’s wary of being seen as a gentrifying outsider in this close-knit region.
“I was working with local governments and their main issue was an aging, rural population that didn’t have the time or skills to market their amazing products outside of Japan. They thought they had very little to offer. A big part of my job was convincing them that this wasn’t the case.”
New to udon making, she’s forthright about her reliance on the expertise of udon natives like Higashida and her desire to commit long-term to the area.
“I felt consulting and online marketing wasn’t really helping and it was time to start my own business.
