This is Part 2 of Ramens I Have Loved. Find part 1 here: Tsuruoka Spicy Miso Ramen.
The summer after I graduated from high school, in 2003, my brother Zak and I went to Japan together. He had two friends who had moved to Tokyo somewhat recently and I had a round trip ticket to Tokyo I had won through a Japanese language speech contest, so we decided to spend several weeks together on the other side of the Pacific. This is the first trip I can remember taking with my brother, just the two of us. He plotted a trip starting with a bullet train ride southwest from Tokyo to Hiroshima down the island of Honshu, then across Hayatomonoseto Strait to Fukuoka, the biggest city on the island of Kyushu. We would travel by small trains around the island, and then head back to Tokyo to hang out with his friends.
I was eighteen years old, filled with equal parts extreme curiosity and self-loathing-fueled introversion. I wanted to be exposed to new things and also to never be noticed or seen, a common tween/teen conundrum that can feel like having hair all over your body. This itchy discomfort of the self was beautifully alleviated by spending time with my older brother, who is 10 years and 9 months older than me (not to put too fine of a point on it). Until this trip, I always felt like a child around him. At some point when I was in high school, he moved back to Portland from graduate school and lived in various houses with roommates. He and his friends were surprisingly invested in exposing me to things they thought were cool, and I would pal around with them like a sidekick. I’m not certain that Zak had an articulated agenda to make sure his little sister became someone he liked to hang out with, but in an emotional sense he took my hand and let me walk with him wherever he went.
2003 was also the year that the United States invaded Iraq. Shortly before I left Portland for Japan, standing in line at the grocery store, a boy I had gone to high school with who I hardly knew came up to tell me he had enlisted and was being shipped out that week. I had no idea how to feel the weight of what he was saying. I just nodded and wished him good luck, and we said goodbye.
My first memory of that trip with Zak is walking off the bullet train in Fukuoka at night and carrying our backpacks a few blocks away to a motel for Japanese businessmen, which seemed out of a dystopian plasticized future—tiny beige rooms, rounded nesting shelves, miniature complimentary toothbrushes about the size for a cat’s mouth. I think we fell asleep almost instantly and awoke the next morning with an overwhelming hunger. We ate breakfast in a strange nook space of the motel and then walked into the streets of Fukuoka with a loose sense that we would carry ourselves on foot all over the city to eat and see art. Within 15 minutes of leaving our motel, we were already starving again and decided to b-line it (several miles) to a restaurant Zak had read about.
There was a line snaking into a dark alley, no restaurant signage I could decipher in sight, but I asked a few people who affirmed that we were at the right place, and we joined the end of the line. An hour or so later, when we reached the front, we were presented with a vending machine that dispensed tickets. There was only one item on the menu: Hakata Ramen.
Kyushu is famous for its Hakata ramen, which is distinguished by a very cloudy and pinguid tonkotsu pork broth cooked from bones for many many hours. Thin, straight, light-colored noodles sit in the broth and pick up just the right amount of fat—not too much because their surface area is small. Every bite is rich but not sickening. Somehow, squiggly noodles just wouldn’t do here: too much action, too much fat splashing around at one time. I didn’t know any of this then. I didn’t know what Hakata ramen was. I only knew that Zak and I were in an alley with dozens of hungry (but very polite) people behind us staring at a vending machine in Japanese.
Despite having only one menu item, we still had choices to make: buttons allowed us to add extra green onions and pork, and the ticket itself asked us to select our noodle texture, aldente to soft; richness level, clean to fatty; level of spiciness, mild to hot, etc. The man behind us helped us read our options, and we each calibrated our bowl like a technician and then were led inside a large windowless room filled with cubbies. I was led to my cubby and Zak to his, separated for the first time in days.
I am not Catholic and have never entered a confessional, but that was what I thought of sitting alone in my private cubby, walls enclosing me on either side, a small counter and rice mat curtain window in front of me. Someone I couldn’t see asked for my ticket, which I handed over, and then within minutes slid me the bowl of soup I had selected: al dente noodles, medium fattiness to the broth, regular amount of pork, heap of green onion, extra spicy (I honestly don’t remember there being an egg, a strange hole in my memory).
This was my first bowl of ramen. I had eaten what might amount to thousands of packages of instant ramen growing up (even as the child of hippies who worked at a natural foods grocery store, we were never without Chicken Flavor Top Ramen on our shelves). I might have eaten ramen in a restaurant in Japan as a younger kid because I recall having an aversion to the pink-lipped fish cakes. But it doesn’t matter. This one, right here at a restaurant called Ichiran, was my first bowl of ramen. It was so delicious that I lost myself completely. Thank god I was alone; I don’t think I could have spoken to anyone. I was totally immersed in the relationship between the many elements at play—the rich soup, the clean green onion, the slippery noodles. My environment disappeared and it was just me and that bowl of soup floating in space. I had never had an experience like that before, where I felt so comforted and challenged by my food at the same time within a setting that made it clear that reverence and attention were called for.
Zak and I both emerged dazed but hyper, like we had participated in a piece of performance art. We had to understand what made that soup so good, why those noodles were the right noodles, why it was okay to have a broth that rich and also slices of pork belly. We talked about it so much that we canonized the experience. I began to think of ramen as one of the most ingenious foods in the world. I made two more pilgrimages to Ichiran on trips to Japan in the years that followed.
A few days later, Zak and I returned to Tokyo to meet up with his friends Jeff and Jason. Jeff had a job as a voice actor at NHK studios on a puppet show focused on teaching young Japanese kids English. When we arrived, they were in the midst of filming. Jeff was off to one side recording while puppeteers worked his characters on the stage: Onion Boy, Prince of Onion Land, who had an enormous onion for a head and a little regal body like King Friday XIII on Mr. Rogers, and Dr. Globe, a discombobulated professor type with a globe for a head that would rise and spin in circles whenever he was confused. It was trippy in the most delightful kind of way. After filming, Jeff, Zak and I met up with their friend Jason and the four of us went out to eat and then to a karaoke bar. I drank Chu-Hi, a Japanese white claw before white claw existed, and smoked Peace Brand cigarettes I bought from a vending machine (I could also have chosen an equally cynically named brand of cigarettes called Hope).
In our little private karaoke room, we drank and sang and drank and sang and smoked cigarettes and drank and sang. At a very bleary moment deep in the night, Jeff was singing “Walk Like an Egyptian” when he stopped following the lyrics and started freestyle ranting, then screaming about the War in Iraq, the nonexistence of “weapons of mass destruction,” the idea of familial revenge playing out on a global scale, and the all too real ineptitude of “W.” I remember being frozen in place, in shock, and then melting into a feeling of cathartic heartbreak and rage towards the country where I lived. The United States intentionally defanged Japan after World War II, writing what they called a “Pacifist Constitution” that limited Japanese military spending to 1% of GDP. But they did nothing to defang themselves.
Afterwards, overwhelmed, I walked outside to get fresh air and sit alone in the neon night until I felt calm. Reentering the karaoke shop, I was faced with a hallway of identical doors and no idea whatsoever which room was ours. I was in an extradimensional world where each door held a mystery. Tentatively, I opened a door and found a group of six Japanese twenty-somethings—five women lounging around one man who was singing REM’s “Losing My Religion” in dispassionate English. I quickly shut the door and then burst into laughter. When I made it back to our karaoke room, I was so excited to tell them about this other room, only one room away. I was so excited about the texture my life was taking, filled with weird and magical things.