Ramen Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Ramen traces back, at root, to the noodle dishes of China. Techniques of hand-pulled and wheat noodles reached Japan through Chinese cooks working in the Chinatown of Yokohama. Served as a soup noodle known as nankin soba or shina soba, it took a decisive step forward in Asakusa, Tokyo. When Rairaiken opened in 1910 and put out a soup noodle made by a Chinese cook brought in from Chinatown, the direct ancestor of today's ramen appeared in the middle of an ordinary city street. Built on a pork- and chicken-bone stock seasoned with soy sauce and reworked for Japanese tastes, this bowl was no single person's invention. It emerged from the way a Chinese noodle dish was taken up and remade in a Japanese city.

What later carried ramen up to the status of a national dish were the conditions of postwar society. After the defeat, cheap wheat flowed in from the United States in large quantities, and the government encouraged eating made from flour. Inexpensive wheat reached street stalls and specialist shops, and the single bowl of ramen turned into everyday food for ordinary people. Then, in 1958, instant noodles—ready with nothing more than hot water—arrived, and ramen spread into home kitchens and, in time, overseas.

Seen this way, today's ramen is a Chinese-derived dish that grew up on its own in Japan. It came from a Chinese noodle dish remade in Japanese cities, not from a native noodle tradition carried forward unbroken. Grasping this origin is what decides how to weigh the origin legend told next.

Whenever the origins of ramen come up, one colorful tale always shows up. Tokugawa Mitsukuni—the lord known from the Mito Komon dramas—is said to have eaten a Chinese-style noodle linked to Zhu Shunshui, an exiled Confucian scholar, in 1697, and this, the story goes, was the first ramen in Japan. It is an anecdote that flatters lovers of history, and it has spread as the supposed origin of 'Mito-domain ramen.'

But the tale collapses in two ways. First, there is no reliable record that Chinese noodles were passed to Mitsukuni. Barak Kushner's history of ramen (Slurp!, Brill 2012; Japanese edition Akashi Shoten, 2018) argues that the noodle description in Mitsukuni's diary refers to soba, a different thing from ramen, and that it is hard to imagine Zhu Shunshui, a Confucian scholar, teaching him to cook. The account is also cut off from the line of descent of present-day ramen, and it rests on nothing but the origin legend itself, without independent support.

More decisive still is that a far earlier record of Chinese-style noodles has come to light. The diary of a Zen monk, the Inryoken Nichiroku, notes that in 1488 a Zen monk in Kyoto served guests a Chinese-style noodle called keitaimen, made with kansui (lye water) (as documented by the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum). That is roughly two hundred years earlier than the Mitsukuni anecdote. So even if one were to compete over 'the first person in Japan to eat Chinese-style noodles,' Mitsukuni would not even reach the starting line. The banner of 'Japan's first ramen' fails twice over.

Where, then, does the firm starting point lie? The food historian George Solt, in The Untold History of Ramen (University of California Press, 2014), placed the beginning of ramen among the Chinese eateries of the early twentieth century. The view that takes Rairaiken in Asakusa in 1910—serving a soup noodle rooted in Yokohama's Chinatown—as the direct ancestor of present-day ramen is now settled as the standard account.

Yet not everything is closed. The earliest known appearance of 'nankin soba' in print goes back even further than Rairaiken, to 1884, in an advertisement by the Western-style eatery Yowaken in Hakodate (as PRESIDENT Online and Sarai.jp have traced among the earliest printed sources). Even so, no source lets us assert that the nankin soba of that time was the same thing as today's ramen; it did not catch on and died out, and its continuity with present-day ramen still cannot be confirmed. Having dismissed Mitsukuni's invented tale and set Rairaiken as the firm starting point, the identity of the early forerunner that lies just before it remains an open question. This is where the history of ramen now stands.