How ramen became Japanese

Today ramen feels so thoroughly Japanese that it's hard to picture the country without it. Yet a little over a century ago, a bowl of wheat noodles in pork or chicken broth was simply "Chinese food", eaten mostly in the port towns where Chinese communities lived. How it crossed over is one of my favourite food stories, partly because it's a story about ordinary people: migrants, stall-keepers, hungry workers and one very determined inventor.

Noodles through the open ports

In the 1850s and 1860s, under pressure from Western powers, Japan opened a handful of ports to foreign trade after more than two centuries of tightly restricted contact. Yokohama, Kobe and Nagasaki became bustling international towns, and alongside the Western merchants came Chinese traders, cooks and workers. The Chinatowns that grew up there are still among the best known in Japan.

In their eateries, people ate soups of wheat noodles in meat broth. Japan was no stranger to noodles in broth, with soba and udon long established, but these were different: springy, yellowish noodles made with alkaline salts, in a savoury broth built on pork or chicken rather than fish. That alkaline ingredient, kansui (かん水), is still what gives ramen noodles their bite.

Popular stories push Japan's first taste of Chinese noodles back to the 1600s and a curious feudal lord. They're fun, but best treated as legends. The line that leads to the modern bowl runs through the port towns.

Rairaiken and the name game

The crossover moment usually pointed to is 1910, when a restaurant called Rairaiken (来々軒) opened in Asakusa, then one of Tokyo's liveliest entertainment districts. It is often called Tokyo's first ramen shop: a Japanese-run restaurant that, as the story is usually told, hired Chinese cooks from Yokohama and served noodle soup to ordinary Tokyoites rather than to a Chinese community. Its soy-seasoned bowls are widely seen as an ancestor of Tokyo shoyu chuka soba, the clear brown style that still feels like the city's default.

The dish went through several names on its way to "ramen". In the early decades it was commonly called shina soba (支那そば), using an old Japanese word for China that came to be seen as derogatory and fell out of use after the war. It gave way to chuka soba (中華そば), "Chinese soba", a name you'll still see on the curtains of old-fashioned shops, especially those serving gentle shoyu bowls.

And ramen (ラーメン)? The word was already in use in places, but it became the everyday name later in the twentieth century, and the 1958 launch of a product called Chicken Ramen is often credited with spreading it nationwide. Where the word itself comes from is genuinely debated. One popular theory links it to the Chinese lamian (拉麺), hand-pulled noodles; others point to different Chinese noodle names, or to a story about a cook calling out that a bowl was ready. Nobody has settled it, and I suspect nobody will.

After the war: wheat, stalls and hunger

The real explosion came after 1945. Japan faced severe food shortages in the post-war years, rice was scarce, and large quantities of wheat flour arrived from the United States, first as aid and later as imports. Wheat-based foods, from bread in school lunches to noodles, became part of daily life in a new way.

Noodle soup was cheap to make, filling, warm and quick, exactly what a hungry, rebuilding country needed. It was sold from black-market stalls and from yatai (屋台), wheeled street stalls that set up in the evening. Many accounts also note that people returning from mainland China after the war brought Chinese cooking know-how home with them, and some went into the noodle business. Ramen became the food of workers, students and late nights, a reputation it has never quite lost, and I hope it never will.

1958 and the regional boom

In 1958, Momofuku Ando's company Nissin released Chicken Ramen, widely regarded as the world's first instant ramen, and ramen moved from the street stall into the home kitchen. Around the same period, regional styles were taking shape across the country. Sapporo developed its rich miso ramen; Kyushu built its cloudy pork-bone tonkotsu broths; towns from Kitakata to Onomichi worked out their own versions with local soy sauce, local fish and local habits.

By the 1980s, regional or "local" ramen, gotochi ramen (ご当地ラーメン), had become something people travelled for. Juzo Itami's 1985 film Tampopo, a comedy about a woman setting out to make the perfect bowl, captured the growing obsession, and in 1994 a whole museum dedicated to ramen opened in Yokohama. Today the regional styles are so many and so distinct that we keep a regional ramen map just to keep track of them.

What I find most moving about ramen's story is how little of it was planned. Nobody designed a national dish. Migrant cooks, street vendors and home cooks simply kept making bowls that people wanted to eat, and a foreign soup became, slowly and stubbornly, Japan's own.