The Ramen King and I (20 page)

Read The Ramen King and I Online

Authors: Andy Raskin

BOOK: The Ramen King and I
9.21Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“Hey, Bobby, why do you like soul food?”
“Because,” Bobby answered, “it makes me”—then he stretched out the last word—“haaaaaaaaaaaapy.”
Why did I want to meet the inventor of instant noodles? It was a straightforward question. I shook my head at the foolishness of my reply.
“I just wanted to.”
We talked about lots of other things, and then Masako asked another question.
“Where are you staying?”
I told her.
“That’s a great name for a hotel,” she said, and when we finished our mojitos, the owner called us another taxi.
At the Hotel Excellent, the driver flung the rear door open with his remote control, and Masako got out of the car. We rode the escalator together to the second-floor lobby.
“Do you want to hang out in my room?” I asked, even though it was not yet Day Seventy of my ninety-day commitment to Matt.
She walked into the elevator without answering, and when we got to my room, she headed straight for the bathroom, where she proceeded to take a shower. When she came out, she was wearing nothing but one of the hotel’s yukata robes. The words
Hotel Excellent
were printed in katakana, hundreds of times, all over the robe. She said she hadn’t been with anyone since her divorce, which meant in over a year.
For the next hour, I didn’t think at all about failing to meet Momofuku Ando.
When we fell asleep, I dreamed that Yamazaki called and invited me to participate in the training on Futonjima, the deserted island. The managers and I were pitching tents on the beach when I heard a helicopter above me, and looking up, I saw the Chikin Ramen Tweety Bird-like mascot painted on the helicopter’s tail. A rope ladder unfurled from the helicopter, and Nissin CEO Koki Ando, in sweat-pants and a T-shirt, descended on it, then jumped onto the beach. “What do you want?” he screamed at the managers. The managers shouted answers. “I want an instant T-bone steak!”; “I want instant lobster!”; “I want instant world peace!” Staring right at me, Koki repeated his question, but I awoke before answering.
It was five o’clock in the morning, and I was alone in the twin bed. Masako lived in the neighborhood, so she must have walked home. The yukata robe lay neatly folded on the desk.
I got out of bed and jumped into the shower. The nozzle was higher than the one in the Osaka business hotel, so the water hit my chest instead of my belly. The soap smelled sweet, like apricots. I scrubbed it into my skin with a small cloth. I scrubbed hard, as if I could wash away the fact that I had broken my promise to Matt.
A VERY BRIEF HISTORY OF MOMOFUKU ANDO, PART 12 : A MIND TORMENTED WITH REGRET
A
ll of Ando’s accounts are vague about how he became the chairman of the credit association, the demise of which led to his year in the backyard shack. He states only that he initially turned down the post but was eventually “sweet-talked” into it.
“Just lend us your name,” someone from the association said.
Although Ando lost most of his wealth during the two years he was held in Sugamo Prison, his reputation remained intact. Making the rounds of his business contacts and friends in downtown Osaka, he gathered nearly half a million dollars in deposits in just one day.
Unfortunately, his credit association made many bad loans. Ando claims they were executed by subordinates without his knowledge. Nevertheless, when the association declared bankruptcy, depositors went after him to recoup their losses. They took almost everything he had.
“I was left with only my house in Ikeda City,” he writes in
Magic Noodles
, “and a mind tormented with regret. I wondered if this was what it meant to be punished by heaven.”
PART III
THE FUNDAMENTAL MISUNDERSTANDING OF HUMANITY
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Let me tell you a little about Andrew. That’s his real name, by the way.
When he says that he works for a “nationally published business magazine,” he’s trying to imply that it’s a magazine you’ve heard of, like
Fortune
or
Forbes
or
BusinessWeek.
Trust me, you’ve never heard of it. Did you know that he’s disliked by many of the editors and writers he works with? It’s true. One reason is that he’s conceited, as evidenced by the fact that he often gets upset when his story ideas are criticized. Every Thursday morning at eleven o’clock, Josh presides over the story meeting in the large conference room, and writers and editors like Andy pitch their story ideas. While one person is pitching, others around the table chime in with their objections. Things like “
BusinessWeek
did that story last week” or “If we do that story it might not work out because” of x, y, or z. But Andrew is so sensitive that he can’t handle the objections. His ego is so fragile that he gets upset hearing this kind of honest, constructive criticism. I mean, please. This is how idea meetings work at every magazine and newspaper on the planet!
He’s not so in shape anymore. There is the beginning of a paunch. A layer of flab has appeared on the insides of his thighs. I tell him YOU SHOULD BE THINNER, but he says he can’t do long-distance running because he feels pain in his shins from so many marathons. I always tell him, YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE RUN SO MANY MARATHONS. I used to tell him, YOU SHOULD DO YOGA, but that was a disaster. He tried it, and aside from downward dog, he couldn’t do the poses. He couldn’t even do downward dog properly, and the teacher had to come around and make adjustments. Did I say anything about that? No, I didn’t. I kept my mouth shut. Until one day Andrew’s in yoga and it’s the end of the class and the teacher is doing the
shavasana
and she’s saying, “Breathe in compassion for yourself, breathe out compassion for others,” and before she’s finished, he farts. He farts in yoga, right in the middle of this very contemplative time! Everyone hears it, and trust me, everyone knows it was him. So I tell him, DON’T GO BACK TO YOGA FOR A COUPLE OF YEARS UNTIL THE PEOPLE CHANGE OVER AND THEY WON’T REMEMBER YOU.
Andrew’s hair is falling out and it’s graying. His father has all of his hair. How embarrassing is that? I always tell him, YOU SHOULD NOT BE LOSING YOUR HAIR.
He tells people he’s fluent in Japanese. Well, sort of. He can read a lot of kanji characters, yes, but he’s forgetting how to write them. And he spent all that time in Japan studying how to write!
Andrew plays the trombone. Is there any instrument less cool? Let’s face it. No one sits around the campfire playing the trombone. In jazz ensembles, the trombones are sandwiched between the trumpets and the saxophones, so no one sees them. In orchestras, they’re in the back. Talk to any trombone player, and more likely than not, that person did not choose the instrument. Usually the band director didn’t have enough trumpets to go around. I remember when Andrew got put into a class to start instruments, and the band director said, “What instrument do you want to play?” And I was like, YOU SHOULD SAY NOTHING BECAUSE YOU TRIED PLAYING THE PIANO AND THE DRUMS AND YOU WEREN’T VERY GOOD AT EITHER ONE, SO WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU’LL BE GOOD AT ANOTHER INSTRUMENT? So Andrew was silent, and the teacher said, “Sit down for a surprise.” The surprise was a trombone. When he moved to San Francisco, he answered an ad for a funk band, and I was thinking, OK, that might get him some exposure because horn players stand in the front in funk bands. But Andrew is a bad dancer and a bad soloist. I keep telling him, YOU ARE A BAD DANCER AND A BAD SOLOIST, SO DON’T DANCE AND DON’T TAKE SOLOS BECAUSE IT’S GOING TO BE EMBARRASSING.
Andrew has very few male friends. There’s Andy, who Andrew met in summer camp, but Andy has a wife and two children and has moved on to adult stages of life, while Andrew remains stunted and single. Andrew used to have three good friends from high school named Dan, Dave, and Sam, but when the four of them would get together as adults, Dan, Dave, and Sam would reminisce about how they went on a backpacking trip to Maine after high school graduation and how the three of them canoed and smoked pot and had all kinds of adventures that Andrew wasn’t part of. Sometimes Dan, Dave, and Sam reminisced about a game they played in junior high school with Ritz crackers, where they would sit around and jerk off onto the crackers and the last one to do it had to eat all the crackers. Now I’m not saying those guys actually ever played the game, but Andrew was certainly never invited. So rather than watch him suffer the humiliation of being the odd man out during get-togethers, I told Andrew, YOU SHOULD BREAK OFF ALL CONTACT WITH DAN AND DAVE AND SAM. In San Francisco, Andrew plays Ultimate Frisbee every Saturday morning with a group of thirty- and forty-something men who have known each other since college, and they all go out for beers or burgers after the games. But they never invite Andrew. Which is probably for the best, because if Andrew were going to hang out with them, he wouldn’t know what to say. I guess he’s still friends with Zen, but that relationship is strained. Zen is in Japan making tons of money as a management coach, so it’s obvious which of the two of them has skills and value.
It’s a shame, really, because Andrew was born with so much promise. He had so much of what I’ll call “life potential.” But I’m like, make something of that already, will you? When he didn’t get to meet Ando, I said over and over, YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE TRIED BECAUSE IT WAS CLEAR THAT YOU WERE GOING TO FAIL AND ANYWAY NO ONE REALLY CARES ABOUT HIM. Then, when he broke his promise to Matt, I told him, YOU SHOULD JUST GO HOME NOW BECAUSE IT’S PRETTY CLEAR THAT YOU ARE NEVER GOING TO HAVE A REAL, COMMITTED RELATIONSHIP WITH A WOMAN, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU PRAY TO THE INVENTOR OF INSTANT FUCKING RAMEN FOR HELP.
M
asako and I had planned to visit the Yokohama Ramen Museum, but I decided to change my plane reservation and fly home instead. In the morning, I called her to say I was leaving, and she walked to Ebisu Station to see me off. She let me know that she was disappointed and confused.
“What happened?” she asked. “Why did you change your flight?”
I was confused myself, so I didn’t know what to tell her. We sat for a while in a coffee shop, and then I hugged her good-bye. As I passed through the Ebisu Station turnstile, I looked back. Masako was dabbing her cheek with a tissue, in the area below her sunglasses.
I had finished all of the
Ramen Discovery Legend
books I was carrying, so on the flight I had nothing to read except
The Story of the Invention of Instant Ramen
—the Nissin-published English translation of
Magic Noodles
that Matsubara had given me. The book answered questions about the invention of instant ramen that I didn’t even know I had.
Q:
Did Ando set goals for the instant ramen he hoped to develop?
A:
Yes, he established five goals. He wanted the resulting noodles to be
1.
Tasty
2.
Able to keep for a long time
3.
Ready in three minutes or less
4.
Economical
5.
Healthy and safe
Q:
What lucky developments coincided with the 1958 launch of Chikin Ramen and helped make it successful?
A:
At least three:
1.
Japanese commercial TV broadcasts began in 1953, allowing Nissin to advertise Chikin Ramen to a mass audience on shows such as
Beaver-chan (Leave It to Beaver).
2.
Japan’s gross national product grew by 17.5 percent in 1959, and 14 percent in 1960.
3.
Instant coffee was introduced to Japan in 1960, helping popularize the word
instant (
spelled “
” in katakana
).
Q:
What did Ando do when Nissin went public on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1963?
A:
He recalled the year in his shack, and he was deeply moved.
 
Q:
Why did Ando almost not make his historic journey to the United States in 1966, the one during which he got the idea for Cup Noodles?
A:
There had recently been two plane crashes at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, and Masako, being superstitious, urged him to stay home. “One can die even while sitting in a room,” he told her, “and it’s highly unlikely another accident will occur in the wake of so many.”
 
Q:
At the offices of which supermarket did he watch American executives eat Chikin Ramen with forks out of Styrofoam cups
(
giving him his inspiration for Cup Noodles
)
?
A:
Holiday Magic, in Los Angeles.
 
Q:
How did Ando feel while watching the Holiday Magic executives eat Chikin Ramen this way?
A:
“At that moment, I understood what it meant to be awakened by the truth.”

Other books

The Red Queen by Philippa Gregory
Bad Medicine by Aimée & David Thurlo
Puberty by Jillian Powell
Cinderella by Steven Curtis Chapman
Wilt on High by Tom Sharpe
The Moon Sisters by Therese Walsh
Do They Know I'm Running? by David Corbett