The Ramen King and I (9 page)

I
had never been inordinately concerned with instant ramen. There were exceptions, of course:

Aside from those times, I had never given instant ramen much thought. I can only assume, therefore, that if I had not been kicked out of Hamako and had not met Masa and had not finished the large-size bowl at Ramen Jiro, I would not have paid much attention when the other Andy held up the issue of
Nikkei Business
magazine with the Cup O’Noodles close-up on the cover.

After the other Andy left the hospital, I opened the magazine. The cover image turned out to be a teaser for a feature story about Nissin Food Products that began with a two-page spread. On the left side, a chart showed the meteoric rise of Nissin’s sales, from near zero in 1958—when the company introduced the world’s first package of instant ramen—to nearly $3 billion. On the right side of the spread, a bowl of noodle soup with an egg on top hovered above the face of an old Asian man. The hair that remained on the sides of the man’s head was white, and his skin was peppered with age spots. He wore dark sunglasses, a black suit, and an expensive-looking gold tie. His mouth was open, as if he had been discussing something very exciting. A caption identified the man as Momofuku Ando, chairman of Nissin Food Products, and the inventor of instant ramen.

Until that moment, I had never heard of Ando, and I didn’t know anything about Nissin except that, when I lived in Japan, I used to see Arnold Schwarzenegger in the company’s commercials. In one of them, he wore a kimono and performed the traditional tea ceremony ritual, but instead of pouring hot water into a teacup, he ladled it into a container of Cup Noodles. (Nissin dropped the
O’
from the American product name in 1993; henceforth, so will I.) I was surprised, therefore, to learn that there was an inventor of instant ramen, and that he had not invented it until he was forty-eight years old.

There were many interesting facts about Ando in the article. Just prior to inventing instant ramen, for instance, he had been the head of an Osaka credit association that lent money to small businesses. After a spate of bad loans, the association went bankrupt, costing him nearly all of his personal assets. Then, for reasons not fully explained in the story, Ando built a wooden shack in his backyard, filled it with cooking equipment, and spent most of 1957 and part of 1958 in the shack. He repeatedly steamed noodles, dried them, and poured hot water over them, but he produced only failure after failure. “I thought and thought about how to do it right,” the article quoted Ando saying. “I thought so hard that I began to piss blood.” His eureka moment came while watching his wife prepare a batch of tempura in boiling hot oil. When he dipped his noodles into the same hot oil, Ando found that frying not only dried them but also left the noodles with small holes that made them highly absorbent. This was before flavor packets, so Ando sprayed chicken stock onto the noodles before frying. He settled on chicken as the soup flavoring because his youngest son, Koki, liked it. Either Ando didn’t know how to spell
chicken
or he simply transliterated back the Japanese transliteration of the English word. When his invention went on sale on August 25, 1958, the package said CHIKIN RAMEN in Roman letters across the top.

The article also explained that Ando had invented the cup of Cup Noodles, which Nissin began selling in 1971, and that it was partly the result of a dream that he had one night in the late 1960s. In 1999, Nissin erected a museum dedicated to the invention of instant ramen across the street from Ando’s house; the centerpiece was a full-scale replica of his backyard shack. A photograph on page 37 of
Nikkei Business
—showing a man boiling water over a campfire—turned out be a scene from an annual Nissin retreat. Every summer, newly promoted managers gathered on Futonjima, a deserted island in the Inland Sea of Japan, where they lived for three days and two nights and ate little more than Chikin Ramen. On Futonjima the managers made fires by rubbing sticks together, and they dug their own latrines. Ando’s son Koki, who has been Nissin’s CEO since 1985, explained in an interview that such measures taught employees to get in touch with their true desires and to express those through new ramen products (as his father had done), even if their ideas seemed outlandish at first. “Only weird people can create something new and interesting,” Koki said in the story. “Right now Nissin’s weirdo-to-normal-person ratio is about one in ten. I’m trying to up that to around two in ten. Any higher, it could become difficult to manage the company.”

The story ended with a sidebar—under the heading “Your Enemy Is Within”—about how Nissin forced the managers of its various product lines to compete head-to-head for resources. The internal competition was credited with inspiring successes such as the now-famous “egg pocket.” When the Chikin Ramen brand manager noticed old men cracking raw eggs on top of their noodles, he introduced a concave well in the noodle brick that kept the yolks from running. Sales skyrocketed.

Josh, my editor, had lived briefly in Tokyo as a child, so he was always up for sending me on reporting trips to Japan. He liked stories with counterintuitive management lessons, and Nissin seemed to offer them in spades. Still, a question lingered in my mind.

Why would a man who ran a credit association, after losing nearly everything, spend a year in a shack trying to invent instant noodles?

With the help of a nurse, I wheeled my IV to a cubicle outside my room, using one of the hospital’s PCs to access the Nissin Web site. I found an e-mail address for the Nissin public relations department and downloaded a free kanji font so I could type in Japanese. While studying at International Christian University, I once spent a week memorizing the seasonal greetings that appear in the first lines of formal Japanese business letters. I chose one for early March.

The hospital sent me home and I rested in bed for several days. When I finally got back to my office at the business magazine, an e-mail reply from Nissin was waiting.

Had I not been clear enough in the previous e-mail? I sent another.

After a few weeks, Yamazaki had not written back. He had included a phone number in his e-mail signature, so I called and left a message, but he never returned the call. Finally, I asked a Japanese researcher in my magazine’s Tokyo bureau to contact him for me.

Not long after that, I got an e-mail from the researcher.

“He hasn’t written back to me either,” she wrote. “Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like this.”