How did a bowl of noodle soup imported from China come to define Japanese food culture? In an extract from his new book, Matt Goulding finds the answer

Toshiyuki Kamimura eats 400 bowls of ramen a year. That’s a bowl every day for lunch or dinner, plus one for breakfast about once a week. For that weekly breakfast bowl he usually goes to Ganso Nagahama out toward the ocean, housed in what looks like an auto-parts warehouse that stays open 20 hours a day. “Sometimes I can’t wait until lunch,” says Kamimura, who consumes his ramen with a sense of urgency, conveying thick ropes of noodles into his mouth and sliding them down his throat like a duck, barely pausing to chew, “so I eat with the taxi drivers getting off the late shift.”

His first memories of eating ramen come from his childhood in Kagoshima, the city at the southern tip of Kyushu famous for its fat-strewn pigs and potato-based liquor. Back then, Kamimura’s parents would have ramen delivered from a local restaurant as a treat for the family. Even with the distance of time and the warm mist of nostalgia, Kamimura can’t help but put a critical spin on those infant ramen moments. “By the time it got home, the broth was cold and the noodles were compromised. It wasn’t impressive ramen.”

He moved to Fukuoka, the largest city on Kyushu, when he was 17 to study photography at Fukuoka University. It was in that first year living on his own that Kamimura had his ramen epiphany. The transformative bowl came from Ichiran, now a popular national chain of middling quality but back then a gateway to a new life: “It was a whole different experience. I had no idea ramen could be so good.”

In the 20 years since, he has gone from being a passionate consumer to one of Japan’s most important ramen bloggers. When it comes to food writing, the Japanese are avid consumers of data, and the nascent ramen blogging industry specialises in chronicling every aspect of Japan’s chief noodle obsession. On his website, Junction 9 (named for a local intersection with a concentration of killer ramen), Kamimura reviews hundreds of shops across Kyushu, offering detailed analysis on broth strength, noodle type and topping cohesion. He’s also a frequent contributor to Ramen Walker, the most prominent of Japan’s dozen or so ramen magazines, among other publications, and appears regularly on television, offering his take on the pressing ramen issues of the day.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fukuoka: ‘no town in Japan is more dedicated to ramen’ Photograph: Matt Goulding

Ramen bloggers aren’t just passive observers of the noodle soup phenomenon: to be a ramen writer of Kamimura’s stature, you need to live in a ramen town, and there is unquestionably no town in Japan more dedicated to ramen than Fukuoka. This city of 1.5 million along the northern coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands, is home to 2,000 ramen shops, representing Japan’s densest concentration of noodle-soup emporiums. While bowls of ramen are like snowflakes in Japan, Fukuoka is known as the cradle of tonkotsu, a pork-bone broth made milky white by the deposits of fat and collagen extracted during days of aggressive boiling. It is not simply a speciality of the city; it is the city, a distillation of all its qualities and calluses.

Indeed, tell any Japanese that you’ve been to Fukuoka and invariably the first question will be: “How was the tonkotsu?”

Ramen, despite its reputation as a cheap fast food, is a complex pillar of modern Japanese society, one loaded with political, cultural and culinary importance that stretches far beyond the circumference of the bowl. And all those big ideas start here in Fukuoka, ground zero for the ramen craze. I’m stalking the million-footed beast: not just a bowl that will make my stomach dance, but an experience that will help me better understand how a bowl of noodle soup from China came to define Japanese food culture in the 21st century. Any local can take you to a handful of their favourite shops, but it takes the discerning eye of a ramen blogger to understand the details. That is why I’ve enlisted Kamimura-san to be my ramen guru.

In the broadest sense, a bowl of ramen comprises four principal constituents: tare (a seasoning base), broth, noodles and toppings. (Of course, ramen wonks like Kamimura could nitpick these parts into dozens of subcategories.)

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Let’s start from the top of the bowl and work our way down. In theory, toppings can include almost anything, but 95% of the ramen you consume in Japan will be topped with chashu, Chinese-style roasted pork. In a perfect world that means luscious slices of marinated belly or shoulder, carefully basted over a low temperature until the fat has rendered and the meat collapses with a hard stare. The only other sure bet in a bowl of ramen is negi, thinly sliced green onion, little islands of allium sting in a sea of richness. Pickled bamboo shoots (menma), sheets of nori, bean sprouts, fish cake, raw garlic, and soy-soaked eggs are common constituents, but there is a whole world of outlier ingredients that make it into more esoteric bowls.

While shape and size will vary depending on region and style, ramen noodles all share one thing in common: alkaline salts. Called kansui in Japanese, alkaline salts are what give the noodles a yellow tint and allow them to stand up to the blistering heat of the soup without degrading into a gummy mass. In fact, in the sprawling ecosystem of noodle soups, it may be the alkaline noodle alone that unites the ramen universe. “If it doesn’t have kansui, it’s not ramen,” Kamimura says.

Noodles and toppings are paramount in the ramen formula, but the broth is undoubtedly the soul of the bowl, there to unite the disparate tastes and textures at work in the dish. This is where a ramen chef makes his name. Broth can be made from an encyclopedia of flora and fauna: chicken, pork, fish, mushrooms, root vegetables, herbs, spices. Ramen broth isn’t about nuance; it’s about impact, which is why making most soup involves high heat, long cooking times, and giant heaps of chicken bones, pork bones, or both.

Tare is the flavour base that anchors each bowl, that special potion – usually just an ounce or two of concentrated liquid – that bends ramen into one camp or another. In Sapporo, tare is made with miso. In Tokyo, soy sauce takes the lead. At enterprising ramen joints, you’ll find tare made with up to two dozen ingredients, an apothecary’s stash of dried fish and fungus and esoteric add-ons. The objective of tare is essentially the core objective of Japanese food itself: to pack as much umami as possible into every bite.

With all these variables in play, the potential combinations are limitless, but in Fukuoka, the single-minded dedication to tonkotsu is so relentless that all other ramen is beside the point. Kyushu has long been the centre of Japan’s pork industry, and no dish better expresses the potential of the pig better than tonkotsu. To make sure I fully understand the Fukuoka-tonkotsu connection, Kamimura starts me off at one of his favourite shops, Ramen-Ya Mototsugi.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Blogger Toshiyuki Kamimura eats 400 Bowls of ramen a year. Photograph: Matt Goulding

Watching Kamimura review a ramen shop is like watching a detective work a crime scene. He starts with the noren, the cloth awning hanging from a shop’s entrance. “If it’s greasy ramen,” he says, reaching up and rubbing the yellowing drapes with a nod of approval, “it will look like a dirty shirt.”

Next, he inhales deeply. Tonkotsu is famed for its fragrance, which, when emanating from the most intense shops, can assault your olfactory system from a three-block radius. It’s a barnyard smell, pure sweaty-foot funk, and it’s everywhere in Fukuoka, a misty aroma that hangs over the city the way fog clings to the hills of San Francisco.

After he orders, Kamimura turns his attention to the noodles. Are they cooked in individual baskets for easy timing, or are they dropped coil by coil into an open pot of boiling water? Most cooks go the basket route these days, but Kamimura prefers the purity of a free boil. “I respect the talent it takes to cook it all together – it takes real touch and intuition.”

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All the while, he’s watching for little precursors of quality: the way the ramen cook shakes the water from the noodles after they’re done cooking so as not to dilute the precious broth; the careful hand-slicing of a roll of chashu so that it melts on contact with the hot soup; the judicious layering of negi and nori and other garnishes to elongate the textural juxtaposition.

“I work hard to gather all the information necessary to make my judgments. If you don’t poke your head into the kitchen, you never know,” Kamimura says.

Our first bowl of ramen arrives. It’s a muscular rendition, the spitting definition of Hakata-style tonkotsu: pale, thin, straight noodles, thick ivory broth, two slices of chashu, and little else in the way of toppings. Sesame seeds, ground white pepper, and electric pink pickled ginger are the holy trinity of table condiments in Fukuoka, but Kamimura isn’t much for accessories. He wastes no time in cracking his wooden chopsticks and breaching the surface, but I wade in more cautiously.

Inexperienced eaters will require some practice before they learn to handle the volcanic temperatures of a proper bowl of ramen. Waiting for it to cool, though, will prove an unnerving experience for both you and the chef. The only way forward is to abandon western decorum and embrace the slurp, the calculated introduction of air that cools the noodles upon entry. A ramen shop in full feast mode sounds like a car vacuum suctioned against your front seat.

When we finish our bowls – Kamimura in three minutes, me in 12 – beads of sweat have gathered above my brow. I look up, almost surprised and slightly embarrassed to find I’m not alone in the shop.

“Next stop,” he says, and we step outside, swallowed by the bright lights of a Fukuoka night, in search of another bowl.

The earliest footprints of ramen in Japan can be found around the turn of the 20th century, as Chinese migrants in areas such as Yokohama, Hakodate and Nagasaki, the first ports opened to the outside world after hundreds of years of isolationism, began selling the soup to construction workers. Back then it was called shina soba, “Chinese noodles”, and was sold mostly from street carts and, oddly enough, western-style restaurants.

Whatever it might have been before the war, the events of 1937-45 would put ramen culture on an entirely different trajectory. Strict food rationing meant shina soba all but disappeared during the war. When the atomic dust finally settled, the Americans moved in and began to reshape Japanese eating habits in profound ways.

With the country pockmarked by fire bombings and much of the young male population lost to the war, the Japanese became deeply reliant on American supplies as they fought to ward off starvation. Chief among the imports: American wheat and lard, the basis for a bowl of ramen.

In his excellent book The Untold History of Ramen, George Solt points out that these two ingredients, along with garlic, became the basis for what the Japanese called “stamina food”, belly-filling staples such as gyoza, okonomiyaki and ramen that became lifelines in the scavenger years following the war. Rice harvests were largely compromised by the war, so American flour became the building block for postwar recovery, and eventually the reindustrialisation of Japan.

By the 1960s the workforce turned to ramen for fuel. As Tokyo and Osaka began to rebuild and expand, small ramen shops sprouted across the cityscapes to feed the growing body of construction workers at the heart of Japan’s unprecedented growth.

The 1980s marked ramen’s arrival into a whole new social stratosphere. Ramen was no longer a simple staple; it became a craft food, an object of obsession, a means of expression for legions of new cooks. Whereas most Japanese food is bound by tradition and a set of unspoken rules, ramen fans embraced innovation and experimentation.

Young cooks took up the profession in droves, brandishing bandannas, self-branded tees, and a swagger that spoke of a new era of Japanese identity.

By the time Hideto Kawahara was 20, ramen’s transformation from a humble Chinese noodle soup to a Japanese cultural juggernaut was complete. But it had yet to hit its apex. Hideto’s father was a ramen man; in 1963 in Fukuoka he opened Daruma, a small shop serving a thick, dark bowl of tonkotsu to a loyal local clientele. Ramen was one of the few corners of the culinary world where young cooks and entrepreneurs could make an immediate impact, but by the time he was old enough to cook, Hideto – a competitive breakdancer – was more interested in break beats than pork bones.

But Hideto couldn’t dance for ever, so at 28 he gave up the floor spins and waded into the simmering waters of the ramen world. But he didn’t do what sons had been doing for a thousand years in Japan: he didn’t learn from his father. “My father told me he didn’t want me to imitate his ramen. He wanted me to develop my own.”

Instead, Hideto spent five years training down the street from his dad’s shop, and then branched off to start his own, which quickly grew into a popular local chain in Fukuoka. By the time he opened in Tokyo’s Asakusa neighbourhood in 2001, he had a camera crew following his every move for a TV documentary and there were three-hour waits for Hideto’s ramen.

Today Hideto is ramen royalty, owner of 17 shops across the globe, including New York, Hong Kong, Singapore and Cambodia. He’s just one part of a faction of Fukuoka-based chains that have together reshaped ramen on a global scale.

For the better part of 30 years, sushi was Japan’s primary culinary export. But come the mid-noughties a new taste of Japan found its way to Los Angeles and New York. David Chang and his Momofuku Noodle Bar in New York’s East Village was an early and influential player in the ramen game, but it wasn’t until Fukuoka’s most famous export, Ippudo, opened a few blocks west, on Fourth Avenue, in the winter of 2006 that ramen hit full fever pitch. Now you can find ramen shops in Midwestern malls.

There are no boundaries for ramen, no rules. It’s all freestyle

The Japan represented by sushi is a very different country from the one represented by ramen. The former was a hushed, refined, serious country of fine taste and even finer economic means, but ramen represents a less intimidating, less exotic Japan, one dominated by bright lights, bold flavours and the electric pulse of youth-driven pop culture.

Fukuoka, more than any other city in Japan, is responsible for ramen’s rocket-ship trajectory, and the ensuing shift in Japan’s cultural identity abroad. Hide-Chan, Ichiran and Ippudo – three of the biggest ramen chains in the world – have brought the soup to corners of the globe that still thought ramen meant a bag of dried noodles and a dehydrated spice packet. But while Ichiran and Ippudo are purveyors of classic tonkotsu, undoubtedly the defining ramen of the modern era, Hideto has a decidedly different belief about ramen and its mutability.

“There are no boundaries for ramen, no rules,” he says. “It’s all freestyle.”

As we talk at his original Hide-Chan in the Kego area of Fukuoka, a new bowl arrives on the table, a prototype for his borderless ramen philosophy. A coffee filter is filled with katsuobushi, smoked skipjack tuna flakes, and balanced over a bowl with a pair of chopsticks. Hideto pours chicken stock through the filter, which soaks up the katsuobushi and emerges into the bowl as clear as a consommé. He adds rice noodles and sawtooth coriander then slides it over to me.

Compared with other Hide-Chan dishes, though, this one shows remarkable restraint. Other creations include spicy arrabiata ramen with pancetta and roasted tomatoes, foie gras ramen with orange jam and blueberry miso, and black ramen made with bamboo ash dipped into a mix of miso and onions caramelised for 45 days.

Suddenly Hideto jumps up from the table and announces that he needs to go. He leaves me with a bowl of industrial-strength tonkotsu – pig heads viciously boiled in 60-litre iron vats for 48 hours – and a rundown of his itinerary for the next week: first to Singapore, then to Phnom Penh for the opening of his first Cambodian shop, then to New York to roll out a new line of dry ramen dishes, back to Hong Kong to scout new locations, then home to Fukuoka for 36 hours before repeating the loop. The world, he says, is hungry for ramen.

Kamimura has been whispering all week of a sacred 24-hour ramen spot located on a two-lane highway in Kurume, 25 miles south of Fukuoka, where truckers go for the taste of true ramen. The shop is massive by ramen standards, big enough to fit a few trucks along with those drivers, and in the mid-afternoon a loose assortment of castaways and road warriors sit slurping their noodles. Near the entrance a thick, sweaty cauldron boils so aggressively that a haze of pork fat hangs over the kitchen like waterfall mist.

While few are audacious enough to claim ramen is healthy, tonkotsu enthusiasts love to point out that the collagen in pork bones is great for the skin. “Look at their faces!” says Kamimura. “They’re almost 70 years old and not a wrinkle! That’s the collagen. Where there is tonkotsu, there is rarely a wrinkle.”

He’s right: the woman wears a faded purple bandanna and sad, sunken eyes, but even then she doesn’t look a day over fifty. She’s stirring a massive metal cauldron of broth, and I ask her how long it’s been simmering for.

“Sixty years,” she says flatly.

This isn’t hyperbole, not exactly. Kurume treats tonkotsu like a French country baker treats a sourdough starter – feeding it, regenerating, keeping some small fraction of the original soup alive in perpetuity. Old bones out, new bones in, but the base never changes. The mother of all ramen.

Maruboshi Ramen opened in 1958, and you can taste every one of those years in the simple bowl they serve. There is no fancy tare, no double broth, no secret spice or unexpected toppings: just pork bones, noodles, and three generations of constant simmering.

The flavour is pig in its purest form, a milky white broth with no aromatics or condiments to mitigate the purity of its porcine essence. Up until now, Kamimura has worked his way through bowls of ramen with the methodical persistence of a librarian cataloguing books, but something in him changes with the first slurp of Maruboshi’s bowl. His eyes light up, he wiggles his shoulders, and a childish smile breaks out across his face. “What do you think? What do you think?”

For Kamimura, it’s not just a strength thing – it’s a soul thing. It takes time to draw out the soul of ramen – some say hours; others, like Kamimura, say lifetimes.

When the owners spot Kamimura, they hurry over to our booth, offering paper cups of coffee to go with our mystic soup. Kamimura mentions that he’s been reviewing more instant ramen than ever lately, and the woman disappears and comes back with a cardboard box stacked with 16 individual packets of Maruboshi’s take-home product. But his attention isn’t with the owners or the packaged noodles or the steaming cups of coffee. No, it’s aimed squarely at me. He catches my eyes, looks down at my unfinished bowl, then back up at me.

I know what he wants, and after 28 bowls over the course of five days, I’m more than happy to give it to him, but first, he needs to ask.

“You going to finish that?”

Extracted from Rice, Noodle, Fish by Matt Goulding (Hardie Grant Books, £16.99). Click here to order a copy for £12.99 from the Guardian Bookshop







