  Polyakov has conjectured that Yang-Mills theory should be equivalent to a
noncritical string theory. I pointed out, based on the work of Marchesini,
Ishibashi, Kawai and collaborators, and Jevicki and Rodrigues, that the loop
operator of the Yang-Mills theory is the temporal gauge string field theory
Hamiltonian of a noncritical string theory. In the present note I explicitly
show how this works for the one--plaquette model, providing a consistent direct
string interpretation of the unitary matrix model for the first time.
