The Ramen King and I

by Andy Raskin

  “En-Don-Sha-Shou-En-Ji-Sou-Zou-Kyou-Soku . . .”

  The head monk explained the chant’s meaning (which is also summarized on the Enryakuji Web site): “It is the darkness of your heart that leads to enlightenment.” We had to sit seiza-style while he lectured us, and we were forbidden to speak during meals. At night we slept alongside the young gas station attendants on thin futons spread out on a tatami-covered floor. The monks made it clear that we were not supposed to talk after lights-out, but once it was dark, some of the gas station attendants crawled over to where my friends and I were sleeping and asked what we were doing in a Zen temple. We told them that we were forced to be there by our teacher. They said that they were forced to be there by their gas station company, and having bonded in this way, three of the boys asked to arm wrestle Barry. He beat them all—at the same time.

  It was difficult not to question myself. I was on a plane to Osaka so that I could try to meet the inventor of instant ramen—to whom I had been praying because I was cheating in relationships and obsessively dating—without an appointment. I had brought a map showing the location of Nissin headquarters, but what would I say when I got there? I had no idea. Normally I prepared long lists of questions before interviewing an executive. I had nothing.

  To calm myself, I rummaged through my carry-on bag for the Nikkei Business article and reread a section about Ando that I found comforting. It described a famous, long-ago incident in which an executive at Mitsubishi, Nissin’s first big distributor, boasted that Mitsubishi could source everything “from ramen to missiles.” Upon hearing that, Ando reportedly complained that the Mitsubishi executive should have said “from missiles to ramen,” because ramen was the more important of the two.

  As the plane made its final approach into Kansai International Airport, I looked out the window and saw whitecaps breaking over the Pacific Ocean. Would it be odd to say that they reminded me of drops of lard on top of a bowl of soy-sauce ramen? Well, they sort of did.

  A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF MOMOFUKU ANDO, PART 5 : THE INVENTORY PROBLEM

  This is the story of how Ando was arrested by the Japanese military police.

  During World War II, one of his companies produced engine parts as a subcontractor for Kawanishi Kokuki, a maker of combat seaplanes. Because the parts were for military use, the government supplied raw materials and performed a thorough inventory check every month.

  One day (on this point, all of Ando’s autobiographies concur), an employee in the company’s accounting department informed Ando of a problem.

  “The numbers don’t look right,” the man said. “It seems that someone is selling the inventory illegally.”

  Perhaps Ando is exaggerating when he states in Conception of a Fantastic Idea that the climate of World War II Japan was such that a man could be put to death if found guilty of misappropriating government property. In any case, he quickly reported the matter to the Osaka Police Department, where he was told to discuss it with the military police. At a military police station in Otemae, not far from Osaka Castle, Ando was greeted by a man he refers to in his autobiographies as Corporal K.

  “Please wait,” Corporal K said.

  Ando waited, uneasily, in the military police station for what seemed like hours. “At the time,” he writes, “a military police station was a place where even the devil feared to tread.”

  When Corporal K returned, he led Ando into a small room and began interrogating him.

  “You’re really something,” Corporal K said. “You commit a crime and try to blame it on someone else. It’s you who’s been selling the parts on the black market, isn’t it?”

  Kansai International Airport was only ten years old and everything was clean and new. The terminal was one big, shiny electronic gadget.

  I found my suitcase on the carousel and passed through customs. I hadn’t slept on the plane, but I wasn’t tired. On the contrary, I was excited. I was excited to see advertisements in Japanese and newspapers in Japanese. I was excited to read signs in Japanese. I was excited to be surrounded by Japanese people speaking and sending text messages in Japanese on sleek Japanese cell phones.

  Momofuku: (61 days) I am excited by being surrounded by a lot of very attractive Japanese women.

  I followed signs to the Japan Railways ticket office, where I reserved a seat on the Haruka Express Line to downtown Osaka. The man who sold me the ticket complimented my Japanese. “Iya, hotondo wasureta kedo,” I said, waving my hand in front of my face. When someone compliments your Japanese, it’s polite to wave your hand in front of your face and say that, no, you have forgotten nearly everything. The truth was that I had forgotten many things, but hardly everything.

  To reach the train platform, I had to first step outside the airport terminal. As I approached the exit, two glass doors parted automatically, and the rush of hot air made me sweat on impact. Osaka was like an oven. Making my way down an escalator, I cursed myself for trying to meet the inventor of instant ramen in July.

  On the Haruka Express Line platform, I bought a bottle of C.C. Lemon from a vending machine, recalling how Harue and I used to sing the C.C. Lemon jingle, which was just the thirst quencher’s name repeated over and over by a female singer who affected a Katharine Hepburn-like voice tremor. I held the bottle to my forehead to cool off. When the train doors opened for boarding, I rushed onto my assigned, air-conditioned car, and sat in my assigned seat.

  The train was another shiny new gadget. Like all trains in Japan, it rode silently, with no shakes or jolts. This one ran on an elevated track, its tinted windows framing the Osaka skyline, which was not unlike the Tokyo skyline. There were apartment buildings and office towers as far as I could see, which was not that far because of the smog. Billboards on the tops of buildings advertised consumer loans and “capsule hotels”—the ultralow-budget hospitality option in which guests spend the night in stacked fiberglass tubes. (Think coffin, with a television at your feet.) Text of the day’s news stories scrolled along an LED display over the train’s bathroom. “Sumo’s Asashoryu Apologizes for Drunken Rampage.” “Hiroshima Officials Receive Suspended Sentences for Embezzlement.” “Ichiro Extends U.S. Hitting Streak to Eighteen Games.” A young woman in a beige uniform wheeled a snack cart through the aisle. “Cold oolong tea,” she said in the high-pitched voice of Japanese women who sell things. “Rice balls. Mandarin oranges.” Finding no takers, she pushed the cart to the end of the car and turned around, bowing to me and my fellow passengers. It struck me that only in a country where snack vendors must bow before leaving a train car will you find a television show about two hosts who scream, “I wanna ___!” (The converse, I surmised, might also be true.) Out the window, I noticed a grassy park with a baseball diamond. The train was moving so fast that I barely saw it, but before the park whizzed by, I watched a man throw a ball for his dog to fetch in left field. The scene was so familiar, so un-foreign. I imagined that the man knew I was on my way to meet the inventor of instant ramen without an appointment, and that he was telepathically telling me it was a waste of time.

  When the doors opened at New Osaka Station, I wheeled my suitcase onto the platform and began to sweat again. From there I rode an escalator down to a sprawling underground mall. I was surrounded by restaurants and clothing boutiques and bakeries and travel agencies, but most of all, sweaty people on their way home from work. The evening rush hour was just beginning.

  It was too late to visit Nissin, so my first order of business was finding a place to stay for the night. I walked toward one of the travel agencies, and as I passed through a narrow corridor, I felt a stream of cool air hit my sweaty head. Looking up, I saw an air-conditioning vent, and for about ten minutes I stood in that spot. An old man flashed me a look as if to accuse me of hogging all the cold air, and I felt weak and embarrassed.

  Sleeping in a capsule was one option, but the travel office helped me find a room at a reasonably priced hotel. It was what the Japanese call a “business” hotel, which I knew from
experience meant that, even though I was only five foot ten, I would hit my head on the bathroom ceiling. It would have private rooms and air-conditioning, and according to the listing, it was a twelve-minute walk from the station. Exiting the travel office, I noticed an outlet of Beard Papa’s, the Japanese cream puff chain that had recently opened stores in New York and California. I bought a pumpkin-flavored one.

  Momofuku: (61 days) I’m on my way to a business hotel not far from your Osaka headquarters. I keep passing attractive women walking in the opposite direction on the sidewalk. As I approach each one, I find myself staring into her eyes, hoping she’ll return the gaze. It’s as if I’m searching in the eyes of these women for answers, yet I don’t know the question.

  I didn’t time exactly how long it took to walk to the hotel, but my guess is that it took exactly twelve minutes. (If something in Japan takes longer than it’s supposed to, your watch is probably wrong.) I checked in at the front desk and rode the elevator to my room on the third floor. The room had a twin bed and a desk, on top of which sat a small TV and a phone. I hit my head on the bathroom ceiling.

  I wanted to see if I had any e-mail, so I called the front desk and the receptionist directed me to an Internet café around the corner. In my in-box, there was a note from the researcher in my magazine’s Tokyo office. She and the other office staff often took me out for dinner during my reporting trips, so she knew of my interest in Japanese food. “While you’re in Osaka,” she wrote, “why don’t you visit the Gyoza Stadium?” The stadium, she had written, was a food court devoted exclusively to gyoza—Japanese pot stickers. I had heard of the Yokohama Ramen Museum, but I didn’t know there was a gyoza version.

  Momofuku: (61 days) I had the idea to search the America Online member directory for “Osaka AND gyoza lover.” For a moment I took pleasure in the fact that a day was subtracted from my no-dating period when I crossed the international dateline, but then I realized it would get added back on the way home.

  The clerk at the Internet café was no older than sixteen. I paid him for the fifteen minutes I had used the computer, and he complimented my Japanese. I told him that, no, I had forgotten everything. Then I asked what he thought of a ramen place I had noticed across the street.

  “Mmm,” he said.

  In Japan, mmm does not mean “yummy.” It means that there might be a problem.

  “How did you hear about that place?”

  “I saw the sign,” I said. “It looked high-end.”

  The name of the restaurant had been carved in a shellacked tree stump.

  The clerk shook his head.

  “Mr. Customer, I’m going to be frank with you. The ramen there is not very good. It might be the worst ramen in this neighborhood.”

  He recommended instead a restaurant a few blocks away called Shisen Ramen.

  “Mr. Customer, with ramen it’s not always a good idea to be swayed by the sign.”

  It took me half an hour to find Shisen Ramen because it barely had a sign. The menu at Shisen forced me to choose between “original flavor” broth and “new flavor” broth, and with nothing to go on, I closed my eyes.

  O Momofuku. Show me how to live so that I may better do your will.

  I didn’t hear an answer, so I chose “new flavor” on the premise that if the original was so great, why would they have had to make a new one? The soup was a rich, deep brown, and its surface was dotted with orange drops of chili oil. The toppings included chunks of blackened pork, scallions, and a clump of bok choy. I asked the waitress what made the broth so dark and tasty. She relayed my question to the chef, but he was not in the mood to share his recipe. “There’s sesame in it,” he barked. “And chicken.”

  Without a gallbladder, it’s sometimes hard to digest fat. Halfway through, I was feeling queasy, so I took a break and skimmed another episode of Ramen Discovery Legend. Serizawa, the ramen producer, had been cast as the story’s archvillain; he constantly challenged Fujimoto to ramen duels and belittled him as nothing more than a ramen-obsessed fool. But in the episode I read at Shisen Ramen, it was becoming apparent that Serizawa also had a good side, and that his harsh approach might have been a way of helping Fujimoto not only achieve dassara, but also find a ramen recipe that was true to himself.

  “Compared to other traditional Japanese foods,” Serizawa tells Fujimoto, “ramen has no past. There’s no manual, no established theory. That’s why you can express yourself through it. That’s why it can help you understand yourself.”

  A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF MOMOFUKU ANDO, PART 6 : TORTURE

  To help modern readers appreciate the brutality of Japan’s wartime military police department, Ando cites the case of a socialist writer whom the military police allegedly tortured to death in 1933. According to reports quoted by Ando, when the writer’s remains were returned to his family, “his thighs were swollen to twice their normal size as a result of internal bleeding, bruises covered his penis and testicles, and there were 15 or 16 places where needles and spikes had been driven into his skin.”

  “The violence brought upon me,” Ando writes in Conception of a Fantastic Idea, “was no less impressive.”

  In the military prison, Ando was beaten daily with a club and kicked in the stomach. He was forced to sit seiza-style with a bamboo pole inserted between his thighs and calves. This resulted in an agony that he describes as “not of this world.” His cell was so crowded that there was no room to lie on the floor and sleep.

  He was convinced that he would soon be dead.

  The first night in the business hotel, I dreamed about Harue. In the dream, she had gotten divorced and was living in Boston, but she was coming to visit me in San Francisco so we could get married. In reality, she was still married to a Japanese man she had met in Manhattan, and they were living in Tokyo with their two-year-old daughter. I woke up sweating, even though the air conditioner was on full blast.

  It was nine thirty in the morning, but because of the jet lag, I was still exhausted. Sunlight streamed in through the curtains, making it impossible to go back to sleep, so I got out of bed and dragged myself into the shower. I bent my head, not only so that it didn’t hit the ceiling, but also to get my hair under the nozzle, which was fixed at the height of my chest. As the water hit my belly, I thought about my “visiting Nissin” outfit.

  The Go Forth hosts rarely got dressed up, but I had planned the outfit before leaving San Francisco. Gray slacks, blue Banana Republic dress shirt, black shoes, belt. No tie or jacket. The last part was due to Zen’s influence. He had left our company a few months after I did, and under the tutelage of a management coach (a man we had hired at our company), Zen started his own management-coaching business in Japan. He believed that the nonconformity of not wearing ties or jackets projected power, and he called his look “Silicon Valley style.” I was arriving without an appointment, so a little Silicon Valley style couldn’t hurt.

  At a 7-Eleven near my hotel, I bought a bottle of iced tea and two nori-encased rice balls stuffed with umeboshi (pickled plum). While in the store, I spotted packages of GooTa, a premium Nissin line that boasts high-quality, vacuum-packed toppings and goes for three dollars a serving. There were other ramen brands, but the Nissin products seemed to stand out, as if the packaging were screaming, “I am a great bowl of instant ramen!” Near the 7-Eleven, I spotted a small park, where I sat down on a bench to eat my breakfast and thought again about what I would say when I got to Nissin.

  On Go Forth, the hosts usually just screamed what they wanted upon arriving at their destinations, but they traveled with a film crew that could provide at least a modicum of protection. The male host once screamed, “I wanna see for myself the strength of Chinese martial arts movie star Yuan Biao!” and when he spotted Biao about to enter a building, he ran toward him, waving a large paper fan. The male host is overweight and has no formal martial arts training, so it was easy for Biao and his two friends to subdue the host and secure him in a headlock. They repeatedly punched the host
in the stomach until the Go Forth director came out from behind the camera and explained what was going on. I imagined screaming, “I wanna meet Momofuku Ando so I can figure out why I’ve never been able to sustain a long-term, committed relationship!” But I was a journalist who wrote stories about Japan, so my livelihood depended on getting in and out of the country. I didn’t want to do anything that could compromise my ability to obtain a visa.

  The Nikkei Business article quoted Ando saying that he played golf every week on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. It was a Wednesday, so I had to find something to do before lunchtime. I boarded a subway train bound for Osaka’s Naniwa district and followed the signs. I arrived at eleven o’clock, just as the doors were opening.