The Untold History of Ramen: How Political Crisis in Japan Spawned a Global Food Craze

Notes

189 introduction. national food 1. O saki Hiroshi, Nihon ra -men hishi (Tokyo: Nihon keizai shinbun shuppansha , 2011), 223. 2. Though they are not commonly included, beef or beef bones can be used as well, as one finds at the shop Gyu -kotsu Ra -men Matado -ru, near Kita-Senju - station in Tokyo. 3. Japan Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Bureau of Statistics , 2011 National Survey of Prices, www.e-stat.go.jp. 4. The foreign origins, regional variations, ubiquity, affordability, and symbolic associations with youth and the working class are some of the key features shared by both ramen in Japan and pizza in the United States. 5. The museum’s planners decided to use the term raumen rather than ramen because its pronunciation is purportedly closer to the original Chinese term for the dish. Such touches endow the museum with an aura of credibility as the undisputed institution tracing the roots of the dish in Yokohama, the city where the modern Chinese noodle soup originated in Japan. Notes 190 n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 6 – 1 9 chapter one. street life 1. As the Qing dynasty cemented its authority over southern China, a number of Confucian scholars employed by the Ming government fled to Korea and Japan to work as advisors. 2. Kosuge Keiko, Nippon Ra -men Monogatari: Chu -ka soba wa itsu doko de umareta ka (Tokyo: Shinshindo -, 1987), 45–59. 3. Ibid., 57. 4. These five ingredients are the ones presently used by ramen shops serving “Mito-han ra -men” in the city of Mito, Ibaraki prefecture, such as Ishidaya in Yanagimachi. The actual five spices that Zhu Shun Shui suggested to Tokugawa Mitsukuni, however, remain unknown. 5. Until 1854, when the first Perry Treaty took effect, Japan’s Tokugawa regime had maintained a policy of avoiding contact with the Western powers other than Holland for more than two centuries to limit the turmoil caused by the proselytizing efforts of Christian missionaries in Japan. Holland alone had agreed to limit the relationship to trade, and as a result it became the only European country to maintain commercial and diplomatic contact with Japan from 1639 to 1854. 6. The Chinatown districts of the port cities were all referred to as Nankinmachi (Nanjing town). 7. Okuyama Tadamasa, Bunka menruigaku: ra -men hen (Tokyo: Akashi shoten , 2003). 8. Iwaoka Yo -ji, Ra -men ga nakunaru hi (Tokyo: Shufu no tomo, 2010), 28. 9. Hayamizu Kenro -, Ra -men to aikoku (Tokyo: Ko -dansha Gendai Shinsho, 2011), 18. 10. A note on the term Shina: As the image of China shifted in the late nineteenth century from that of a center of high culture (Chu -goku, or Middle Country ) to an aging, conquered nation unable to modernize (Shina), the term for the dish and the social strata of those associated with its consumption changed as well. Known initially as Nankin soba (Nanjing noodles) by the few cultured elites to try it during the early Meiji period, the dish was gradually reconfigured into Shina soba (Chinese noodles, using the colonial Japanese term for China) during the 1910s and 1920s, when it became associated with the factory workers of urban Japan and consumed on a mass scale. At the same time, Western foods such as beefsteaks, biscuits, and French bread became associated with the diets of the Europeanizing elite, illustrating the ways in which cultural hierarchies based on the geopolitics of the time were constructed and reinforced at the everyday level through the differentiation of eating practices. The conceptual remaking of China as “Japan’s Orient” in light of the perceived need to construct Japan itself as a Euro-American-style imperialist nation-state thus led to a shift away from a city-specific identification for the noodles (Nankin soba) to a nation-specific identification (Shina soba), in which a totalized, static, n o t e s t o p a g e s 1 9 – 2 6 191 imaginary community of the denigrated Other came to be represented by the word Shina. The epistemological construction of Shina (the presurrender Japanese term for China) as an “early, glorious stage of oriental culture” that was at the same time “helpless, antiquarian, arrogant, guileful, militarily incompetent, and misunderstanding of Japan’s true aims” was central to Japanese rationalizations for imperialism in East Asia. See Stefan Tanaka, Japan’s Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (Berkeley...