The Ramen King and I (15 page)

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.

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.

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.

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.”

T
o 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.

T
he 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.

It was officially called Namco Gyoza Stadium, Namco being the name of a large Japanese video game company (known best as the developer of Pac-Man). The stadium was housed inside Namco City, a multistory video game arcade. Ascending a series of escalators to Namco City’s third floor, I entered what looked like the central square of a traditional Japanese village. It was a village, however, in which all of the storefronts were outlets of gyoza restaurants. Outside each shop, employees screamed the praises of their gyoza, doing their best to entice customers. “Get your juicy, garlicky gyoza right here!” A bulletin board in the middle of the square, next to a fake wooden footbridge, encouraged patrons to vote for their favorite gyoza; it also showed the previous day’s voting results, broken down into male favorites and female favorites. I bought a three-piece set from Pao, the top male favorite, and ate it on a picnic table in the middle of the stadium. Pao’s employees were screaming that their dumplings were made from beef, not pork, and that they packed extra beef jus. Sure enough, when I took a bite, some jus squirted onto my pants. An exhibit on the wall outlined the history of gyoza, which, like ramen, originated in China and became popular in Japan after World War II. A chart listed the ratios of soy sauce to vinegar commonly found in gyoza dipping sauces in different regions of Japan:

People often ask me what fascinates me about Japan, and for a long time I never knew how to explain it. Here it is, though, in a nutshell:

There’s a Gyoza Stadium on the third floor of a video game arcade called Namco City, and a chart on the wall lists the ratios of soy sauce to vinegar found in gyoza dipping sauces in different regions of the country.

I dabbed the jus stain with a wet napkin and rode the subway back to New Osaka Station. From there it was a short, sweaty walk to Nissin’s Osaka headquarters.

A
lthough he had endured physical torture, Ando always maintained that the most difficult thing about military prison was the food. Meals consisted of little more than boiled barley and pickles, and the dishes were covered in a layer of filth. A self-described clean freak of more than average means, he refused to eat.

Soon, however, he noticed how the other inmates’ eyes sparkled at the sight of his untouched food. This, he wrote, affected him deeply.