The Ramen King and I

by Andy Raskin

  At first I told Zen that there was no way I was moving to Silicon Valley. I had a girlfriend who was in school, so I couldn’t leave New York. I told Harue the same thing, and she seemed happy that I was finally taking action to commit to her. But then I went for a run in Central Park, and on the jogging path I began thinking about other things. I thought about how that feeling of physical discomfort (which I had first experienced with Maureen) had returned when I was with Harue, and how in California, there would be no family to keep up appearances for. There would be no door-men to shoot accusatory glances. It was as if two people inside of me were battling. One was in love with Harue, and the other couldn’t wait to be free of her.

  The day I left New York, Harue stood next to me on the curb as I hailed a cab. I loaded my suitcase into the trunk, hugging her.

  “Maybe you’ll come join me when you finish school,” I said.

  “Maybe,” she replied.

  I got into the cab, and as the driver pulled away, I turned to wave good-bye. As you know, Japanese etiquette dictates that when you see someone off who leaves in a car, you’re supposed to stand there until the car is completely out of sight. I was only a few blocks away, though, when Harue turned to walk home. Her figure got smaller and smaller through the back windshield, and I believe that as she disappeared, Momofuku, so did my soul.

  Sincerely,

  Andy

  I had never been inordinately concerned with instant ramen. There were exceptions, of course:

  • The day my mother brought home a bag of Oodles of Noodles. That was what Nissin called its instant ramen in 1972, when the company launched the product in the United States. I remember, if not many details of that day, an air of excitement in our kitchen as my mother brought the noodles to life in boiling water.

  • The semester in college when the cafeteria workers’ union went on strike. The university refunded each student $72.80 a week to buy food. My roommate and I made the most of the money by stealing a heating coil from the chemistry lab and “cooking” various flavors of Cup O’ Noodles.

  • The year I was a student at International Christian University. Back then, Japan’s automated-teller machines were open only during regular bank hours—weekdays from nine to five. I would often forget to make pre-weekend withdrawals, but thanks to instant ramen, I survived many Saturdays and Sundays on just the few hundred yen in my pocket.

  Aside from those times, I had never given instant ramen much thought. I can only assume, therefore, that if I had not been kicked out of Hamako and had not met Masa and had not finished the large-size bowl at Ramen Jiro, I would not have paid much attention when the other Andy held up the issue of Nikkei Business magazine with the Cup O’Noodles close-up on the cover.

  After the other Andy left the hospital, I opened the magazine. The cover image turned out to be a teaser for a feature story about Nissin Food Products that began with a two-page spread. On the left side, a chart showed the meteoric rise of Nissin’s sales, from near zero in 1958—when the company introduced the world’s first package of instant ramen—to nearly $3 billion. On the right side of the spread, a bowl of noodle soup with an egg on top hovered above the face of an old Asian man. The hair that remained on the sides of the man’s head was white, and his skin was peppered with age spots. He wore dark sunglasses, a black suit, and an expensive-looking gold tie. His mouth was open, as if he had been discussing something very exciting. A caption identified the man as Momofuku Ando, chairman of Nissin Food Products, and the inventor of instant ramen.

  Until that moment, I had never heard of Ando, and I didn’t know anything about Nissin except that, when I lived in Japan, I used to see Arnold Schwarzenegger in the company’s commercials. In one of them, he wore a kimono and performed the traditional tea ceremony ritual, but instead of pouring hot water into a teacup, he ladled it into a container of Cup Noodles. (Nissin dropped the O’ from the American product name in 1993; henceforth, so will I.) I was surprised, therefore, to learn that there was an inventor of instant ramen, and that he had not invented it until he was forty-eight years old.

  There were many interesting facts about Ando in the article. Just prior to inventing instant ramen, for instance, he had been the head of an Osaka credit association that lent money to small businesses. After a spate of bad loans, the association went bankrupt, costing him nearly all of his personal assets. Then, for reasons not fully explained in the story, Ando built a wooden shack in his backyard, filled it with cooking equipment, and spent most of 1957 and part of 1958 in the shack. He repeatedly steamed noodles, dried them, and poured hot water over them, but he produced only failure after failure. “I thought and thought about how to do it right,” the article quoted Ando saying. “I thought so hard that I began to piss blood.” His eureka moment came while watching his wife prepare a batch of tempura in boiling hot oil. When he dipped his noodles into the same hot oil, Ando found that frying not only dried them but also left the noodles with small holes that made them highly absorbent. This was before flavor packets, so Ando sprayed chicken stock onto the noodles before frying. He settled on chicken as the soup flavoring because his youngest son, Koki, liked it. Either Ando didn’t know how to spell chicken or he simply transliterated back the Japanese transliteration of the English word. When his invention went on sale on August 25, 1958, the package said CHIKIN RAMEN in Roman letters across the top.

  The article also explained that Ando had invented the cup of Cup Noodles, which Nissin began selling in 1971, and that it was partly the result of a dream that he had one night in the late 1960s. In 1999, Nissin erected a museum dedicated to the invention of instant ramen across the street from Ando’s house; the centerpiece was a full-scale replica of his backyard shack. A photograph on page 37 of Nikkei Business—showing a man boiling water over a campfire—turned out be a scene from an annual Nissin retreat. Every summer, newly promoted managers gathered on Futonjima, a deserted island in the Inland Sea of Japan, where they lived for three days and two nights and ate little more than Chikin Ramen. On Futonjima the managers made fires by rubbing sticks together, and they dug their own latrines. Ando’s son Koki, who has been Nissin’s CEO since 1985, explained in an interview that such measures taught employees to get in touch with their true desires and to express those through new ramen products (as his father had done), even if their ideas seemed outlandish at first. “Only weird people can create something new and interesting,” Koki said in the story. “Right now Nissin’s weirdo-to-normal-person ratio is about one in ten. I’m trying to up that to around two in ten. Any higher, it could become difficult to manage the company.”

  The story ended with a sidebar—under the heading “Your Enemy Is Within”—about how Nissin forced the managers of its various product lines to compete head-to-head for resources. The internal competition was credited with inspiring successes such as the now-famous “egg pocket.” When the Chikin Ramen brand manager noticed old men cracking raw eggs on top of their noodles, he introduced a concave well in the noodle brick that kept the yolks from running. Sales skyrocketed.

  Josh, my editor, had lived briefly in Tokyo as a child, so he was always up for sending me on reporting trips to Japan. He liked stories with counterintuitive management lessons, and Nissin seemed to offer them in spades. Still, a question lingered in my mind.

  Why would a man who ran a credit association, after losing nearly everything, spend a year in a shack trying to invent instant noodles?

  With the help of a nurse, I wheeled my IV to a cubicle outside my room, using one of the hospital’s PCs to access the Nissin Web site. I found an e-mail address for the Nissin public relations department and downloaded a free kanji font so I could type in Japanese. While studying at International Christian University, I once spent a week memorizing the seasonal greetings that appear in the first lines of formal Japanese business letters. I chose one for early March.

  Greetings.

  Even in the black soil, one can sense the onset of spring.

&
nbsp; I am a journalist working for a nationally published business magazine in the United States. Lately, I have been reading about Nissin’s chairman

  and founder, Momofuku Ando, and I would very much like to interview him for a story about the history of Nissin and instant ramen. Would it be possible to arrange an interview in June? I can travel to Japan anytime during that month.

  Sincerely,

  Andy Raskin

  The hospital sent me home and I rested in bed for several days. When I finally got back to my office at the business magazine, an e-mail reply from Nissin was waiting.

  Mr. Andy Raskin:

  Thank you for your interest in Nissin. Can you please tell me, exactly what do you want?

  Hisanori Yamazaki

  Public Relations Department

  Nissin Food Products Co., Ltd.

  Had I not been clear enough in the previous e-mail? I sent another.

  Dear Mr. Yamazaki:

  These days, one can certainly smell the chrysanthemums.

  Thank you for your reply.

  I would very much like to write an article about Nissin for my business magazine, which is published nationally in the United States. Toward that end, I was hoping to interview Momofuku Ando about his invention of instant ramen and about the history of your company. If possible, I’d also like to speak with your current CEO, Koki Ando, and some other senior executives. (Can you recommend folks who have a good perspective on Nissin’s current strategy?) Finally, I read the recent article about Nissin in Nikkei Business, and I was fascinated to learn about your management training retreat on the deserted island in the Inland Sea of Japan. Would it be possible for me to attend?

  Sincerely,

  Andy Raskin

  After a few weeks, Yamazaki had not written back. He had included a phone number in his e-mail signature, so I called and left a message, but he never returned the call. Finally, I asked a Japanese researcher in my magazine’s Tokyo bureau to contact him for me.

  Not long after that, I got an e-mail from the researcher.

  “He hasn’t written back to me either,” she wrote. “Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  Dear Momofuku,

  A year after I moved to San Francisco to become CEO of the start-up company, the venture capitalists asked me to resign. There were many reasons for this, including their desire to quickly earn a tenfold return on their investment, the end of the dot-com boom, and our agreement from the start that we would eventually hire someone with more Silicon Valley clout. But I can’t help thinking that another reason was that I had been spending virtually all of my time on America Online, substituting “San Francisco” for “New York” in the member directory.

  While drawing up budgets and financial plans, I would send messages to women I had met through the member directory. While making presentations to the board of directors or talking with customers or employees, I would be thinking about whether I had a date that night and wondering how it was going to go. I still approached women at parties and in coffee shops, and I began playing the trombone in a funk band, which became another way to meet people. Some of these encounters were one-night stands, but most were up-and-up dates that occasionally led to months-long relationships (during which I was always unfaithful). It’s amazing that I functioned at work at all, not to mention as a chief executive officer.

  When the venture capitalists asked me to step down, I hired my own replacement, and then quit with a six-month severance package. Arranging and going on dates began taking more of my time, and virtually everything else in my life fell away. I lost touch with most of my old friends, especially male friends, who were getting married and starting families. I barely spoke to my parents, and on the rare occasions when I visited them in Long Island, I would tell them I was going out at night with my high school friends Dave and Dan and Sam when really I was going out with women I had met online.

  Shortly before leaving the company, I began seeing a therapist. She had an office on Divisadero Street, and I would see her during my lunch hour twice a week. I would sit on the edge of her couch and tell her how depressed I was. I would talk about how I was a failure and how I was not accomplishing anything in my life and how I was afraid I would never live up to my potential. Again, I did not connect these feelings to the lack of integrity in my relationships. In fact, if I spoke to the therapist about women at all, it was to let her know that I had fallen head over heels for somebody new, or that things hadn’t worked out and I was moving on. She would say, “You talk about the end of your relationships as if they were minor inconveniences, as if you were describing something as meaningless as walking out the wrong door of a movie theater.” For a long time, I told her nothing about the cheating or the fact that I was meeting a different woman practically every night through online dating sites. I was hiding it from myself, so I guess it was only natural that I hid it from her.

  When the severance package ran out, I began selling freelance articles to several business magazines, and one of them offered me a full-time staff position. The editor in chief gave me a small office, where I spent hours trading e-mails with women I met online. I discovered Craigslist, a free Web site with an extensive area for online personal ads that made it even easier to meet women. I usually posted ads with the title “Grab Some Sushi Tonight?” I would take dates to an out-of-the-way sushi bar where I knew the owners, an elderly couple that had given me a special nickname to make reservations. I would probably still be doing that if not for what happened next. It began only three months ago, so I remember more of the details. I’ll explain as best I can.

  It started when I wrote an article about a record company in San Francisco. The company produced music CDs for chain stores—albums like Pottery Barn: Summer in the City and Eddie Bauer Legends of Soul. The executive I profiled invited me to his annual Christmas party, and the night of the party, I drove to his office in my blue Volkswa gen Beetle. This was less than two weeks after I had undergone surgery to remove my infected gallbladder, so my body still felt weak. I remember wearing jeans and a dark blue Emporio Armani shirt.

  The office’s interior was a throwback to dot-com chic. The walls were exposed brick and had been decorated with old album covers. Three of the company’s conference rooms had been outfitted with their own bars and appetizer tables, and a deejay was spinning records in the hall. Men wore Banana Republic dress shirts of a shade known around Silicon Valley as “biz-dev” blue. I meandered through the rooms, dividing my time at the various appetizer tables so as not to look like a pig. I chatted for a while with the executive I had profiled.

  “Loved your article,” he said.

  We were still chatting when a woman with dark skin and long black hair walked into the party. She was pretty in a tomboyish way, and her head was cocked in a manner that suggested readiness to pick a fight. She began talking to a tall man with bushy sideburns. Did she know this sideburns man? Were they together? I tried to figure it out. From across the room I heard her laughing at the sideburns man’s jokes. It was a nasal chuckle, but I found it endearing, maybe because I was listening to it while admiring the way her black T-shirt hugged her chest. What was her relationship to the sideburns man? No, I concluded, she was not with him, and sure enough he said good-bye to her in a just-friends way and left the party. I told the executive that I needed another drink, and when I returned I maneuvered myself to a position just a few feet from the woman. For ten minutes I stood next to her, nursing a plastic cup of chardonnay and trying to think of something to say. She spoke first.

  “So you just stand near people you like?”

  “Sorry?”

  “You just get close enough so they get uncomfortable and have to talk to you?”

  I pretended not to understand.

  “The ‘hover technique.’ That’s what you should call it.”

  “Maybe I was hovering a little.”

  Her name, she said, was Amanda.

  “So,” she asked, “which ones d
o you own?”

  “Huh?”

  “The records on the wall. Which ones do you own?”

  “Oh—”

  “No,” she interrupted. “Lemme guess.” She motioned with her chin toward the Rolling Stones’ Sticky Fingers.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, imitating a TV game show announcer. “Don Pardo, tell her what she’ll be taking home as a consolation prize.”

  The nasal chuckle again. “OK, so which ones?”