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

Introduction. National Food

1 O saki Hiroshi, fifty-four, eats approximately eight hundred bowls of ramen per year and writes about ramen for a living. In his book The Secret History of Ramen in Japan (Nihon ra -men hishi), he claims to have ingested more than twenty thousand bowls over his lifetime at 9,500 shops spread across the archipelago of Japan.1 As the founder of the Ramen Bank, a website offering information on 35,330 ramen shops, he is part of a generation of ramen devotees who have worked to elevate the food from one associated with manual labor and night entertainment to an iconic component of Japanese national food culture. O saki and others have transformed ramen in Japan into much more than simply a food. It has become an important source of tourist revenue, an idealized refuge for laid-off workers, and a focal point for the redefinition of the nation and its history. There is something excessive about ramen. The salt, the lard, the lines of people waiting, the guidebooks, the television shows, the museum, and the taste of an unforgettable bowl—there is nothing else quite like it in Japan. The meaning that young people attach to the consumption of this noodle soup has been a seemingly inexhaustible resource for reality television producers , graphic novelists, and food bloggers. Every type of food has its fans, Introduction national food 2 i n t r o d u c t i o n but the exaltation of ramen in Japanese popular culture in the past three decades is difficult to overstate. Ramen is now referred to as a national food (kokuminshoku) in Japan, and it is rapidly gaining popularity among foodies abroad. Sushi, tempura, and teriyaki may be the foods most closely associated with the nation outside Japan, but within the country, ramen and other so-called “B-class gourmet” foods such as Japanese-style curry rice, rice bowls (donburi), and premade lunchboxes (bento -) take center stage as the time-tested comfort foods that have contributed to the postwar healing of the nation. It was not until the 1990s, however, that ramen became recognized as a national food of Japan. How did this happen, and, more importantly, why? What is the relationship between the national media’s spotlighting of the iconic food of the postwar Japanese workingman as a component of national identity and the relative lack of stable employment opportunities, particularly for young people, in the last twenty years? Ramen means different things even to the same people. It can be a marker of cultural loss (wheat over rice) and preservation (noodles over bread), labor (lunch for construction workers) and leisure (late-night carbohydrates after drinking), derivativeness (Chinese influence) and inventiveness (Japanese curry ramen), speed (instant noodles) and slowness (artisanal soup). In this way, symbolic connections between food, national identity, and labor are sometimes contradictory and difficult to untangle. Yet any attempt to discuss culture in modern Japan, and the postwar period in particular, is incomplete without an understanding of food; any analysis of food in modern Japan is wanting without an understanding of the pivotal role ramen has played in defining the working class, and more recently the nation itself. This book therefore examines the history of ramen with a specific focus on the logic behind the dish’s availability, popularity , and function in reproducing labor power and, subsequently, national identity. Ramen has had many incarnations in Japan, and each wave of popularity is attributable to a contingent set of political and economic circumstances that underlie the dish’s symbolic and material resurgence. The shifting composition and function of ramen in terms of ingredients, pricing , and production processes are deeply connected to both shifts in food practices on a mass scale in Japan accompanying the transition to a mod- i n t r o d u c t i o n 3 ern industrial economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries , and the changing symbolic associations of new foods with different nations, regions, classes, and gender roles. By highlighting the materiality of historical change, the book posits that the story of ramen is the clearest manifestation of the changing role of food in the reproduction of labor power and the redefinition of the nation in Japan. what is ramen? Although there are as many types of ramen as there are ramen chefs, the most basic components of a...