One of Japan's most popular and best-value meals is a bowl of noodles , the three main types being soba, udon and ramen. Soba are thin noodles made of brown buckwheat flour and are particularly ubiquitous in the central Honshu prefectures of Gifu and Nagano, though available all over Japan. If the noodles are green, they've been made with green tea powder.

There are two main styles of serving soba - hot and cold. Kake-soba is served in a clear hot broth, often with added ingredients such as tofu, vegetables and chicken. Cold noodles piled on a bamboo screen bed, with a cold sauce for dipping (which can be flavoured with chopped spring onions, seaweed flakes and wasabi - grated green horseradish paste) is called zaru-soba or mori-soba . In more traditional restaurants you'll also be served a flask of the hot water used to cook the noodles, which is added to the dipping sauce to make a soup drink once you've finished the soba.

In most soba restaurants, udon will also be on the menu. These chunkier noodles are made with plain wheat flour and are served in the same hot or cold styles as soba. In Nagoya, a variation on udon is kishimen , flattened white noodles, while the Shikoku and Okayama-ken version is known as sanuki-udon . For yakisoba and yakiudon dishes the noodles are fried, often in a thick soy sauce, along with seaweed flakes, meat and other vegetables.

Ramen , or stringy yellow noodles, were originally imported from China but have now become part and parcel of Japanese cuisine. They're usually served in big bowls in a steaming oily soup, which typically comes in three varieties: miso (flavoured with fermented bean paste); shio (a salty soup); or shoyu (a broth made with soy sauce). A range of garnishes, including seaweed, bamboo shoots, pink and white swirls of fish paste, and pork slices, often finish off the dish, which you can spice up with added garlic or a red pepper mixture. As with the other types of noodle, many regions of Japan have their own local versions of the dish, such as Sapporo, which specializes in the rich bata-kon (butter- and corn-flavoured) ramen. Wherever you eat ramen, though, you can usually get gyoza , fried half-moon-shaped dumplings filled with pork or seafood, to accompany them.