The Department of Tourism is working with Minami Awaji City Hall and local tourism businesses to revitalize the tourism area. This time, the Japan Food Newspaper featured an initiative to hold a prototype workshop for "somen sweets" as an idea to revitalize the local traditional industry of "hand-pulled somen."
Minami Awaji City's hand-pulled somen noodles are a traditional industry that was introduced to the city in the Miwa region of Nara during the Edo period and became a winter side job for fishermen.130However, due to a decline in consumption and the difficulty of the manual labor, the number of noodle factories is decreasing, and there is a risk that they will not be able to continue producing noodles in the future.
In this situation, we collaborated with the Awaji Hand-pulled Somen Cooperative, which has been working to revitalize Awaji hand-pulled somen, including by opening a somen restaurant, and took on the theme of "Sweets x Walking Around Town x Somen" to explore new possibilities.
The students brainstormed ideas based on their prior research and also took inspiration from sweets in the international students' home countries.6We came up with a variety of menu items, and made and tasted them together with the chairman of the association, President Kanayama of Kanayama Seimen Co., Ltd., and employees of Shinki Bus. As a result of not only coming up with various flavor combinations, but also paying particular attention to appearance, we received feedback that some of the menu items could actually be used in products. We also received a suggestion that the prototypes themselves could be turned into a tourist experience program.
These efforts were featured in the Japan Food News as a unique initiative to revitalize the local traditional food industry.
https://news.nissyoku.co.jp/news/tsutsui20250206113541859(Paid article)
We plan to continue to consider various options in the future so that we can commercialize the product.
