Soba (buckwheat) noodles are a central part of both Japanese cuisine and the Tokyo cityscape, with hundreds upon hundreds of soba shops – many of them little more than stop-and-go stalls – littering the streets of our dear city. While most of you probably have never even given it a thought, soba allergy is actually a rather common ailment, albeit not a very well publicised one.
Good thing there's now a very easy way to check if you’re allergic to soba: the 'soba allergy tattoo’, introduced by the ubiquitous Fuji Soba chain, does the trick while also serving as a temporary skin decoration. Earlier this month, we visited Fuji Soba's Asakusa outpost to try it out for ourselves.
Soba allergy is particularly poorly recognised outside of Japan, but it’s best to make sure you’re not allergic – lest you have an anaphylactic shock and fall headfirst into your bowl. To prevent such unfortunate accidents, the Japan arm of the J. Walter Thompson ad agency came up with this snappy allergy checker-meets-skin art patch.
After going through a quick medical exam, we got to choose a tattoo from three different designs – an ukiyo-e style 'beautiful woman', kabuki actor or Mt Fuji – and placed the sticker on our skin before rubbing it with sobayu (water boiled with soba). The verdict is delivered after a 15-minute wait: if the tattoo appears speckled with red spots, this unfortunately means you’re allergic to soba.
Donning a temporary tattoo sure beats going through the trouble of visiting a doctor and waiting for days to get your blood test results back, so we hope this form of testing will become applicable to other allergens as well. Meanwhile, you'll still have to wait a little longer before trying out the soba tattoo yourself, as there's no set release date for the product yet.
