"Japanese Soba in a Bawl" - Hanamaki City Website
Kyodo: Soba champ eats 201 bowls in 5 minutes
A soba-eating contest was held Friday in Hanamaki, Iwate Prefecture, with 140 hungry participants taking part in five categories. Contestants had to eat as many miso soup-sized bowls of the buckwheat noodles as they could in five minutes. The overall winner, a 37-year-old man from Miyagi, downed 201 bowls, 20 short of the record of 222 set by a housewife last year.
Tohoku Electric Power Homepage
Wanko soba is an entertaining and competitive way to enjoy buckwheat noodles. The idea is to see how many bowls of noodles you can eat. Each serving is quite small, however every time you empty a bowl, it is immediately filled again with noodles. As the bowls are filled the waiters and staff shout encouragement to the dinners, saying, "jan jan,"...And every year Iwate hosts the Wanko Soba Championships where gluttons from all over Japan come to compete.
Two FGs "eating-till-they-puke" at the Restaurant Azumaya in Morioka - from uwplatt.edu: Morioka Field Trip 2004