Rice, Noodle, Fish (19 page)

Inexperienced eaters will require some practice before they learn to handle the volcanic temperatures of a proper bowl of ramen. Waiting for it to cool, though, will prove an unnerving experience for both you and the chef. The only way forward is to abandon Western decorum and embrace the slurp, the calculated introduction of air that cools the noodles upon entry. A ramen shop in full feast mode sounds like a car vacuum suctioned against your front seat. It will take a few scaldings and a few stained shirts, but until you learn to properly slurp, expect to be lapped by grandpas whose bowls are dry before you've had the chance to slip the first noodles past your lips.

When we finish our bowls—Kamimura in three minutes, me in twelve—beads of sweat have gathered above my brow. I look up, almost surprised and slightly embarrassed to find I'm not alone in the shop.

“Next stop,” he says, and we step outside, swallowed by the bright lights of a Fukuoka night, in search of another bowl.

米 麺 魚

Kyushu, as the southernmost of Japan's four main islands, has always been a gateway to the outside world. In fact, for much of Japan's modern history, it was the only way in and out.

When the shogun Tokugawa Iemitsu closed Japan's borders in 1635, ushering in two centuries of virtual isolation, Nagasaki on Kyushu's west coast remained the only open port in the country. It became a tiny door through which cultural artifacts from the outside world could
enter. Portuguese missionaries brought tempura and Christianity. The Koreans introduced a rich ceramics culture. And the Chinese arrived with their noodle soups, including
champon
, a Nagasaki specialty of pork, seafood, and egg noodles that some believe to be a precursor to Japanese ramen.

At the same time, Kyushu maintained a wild, rebellious edge. For much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it became a clubhouse for buccaneers and misfits, a refuge where pirates could take advantage of Japan's lack of centralized power and public order to loot and pillage. By the nineteenth century, much of this rogue energy had coalesced into one of Japan's mightiest military factions. It was in here, in Satsuma in 1877, shortly after the inception of the Meiji era, that the last samurai took a final stand against imperial Japan.

Kyushu later became a home of industry—steel and iron, mostly—and as such took on an outsize role in World War II. The southern island became a favorite target for American attacks, starting with the 1944 bombing of Yahata. In fact, Yawata Steel Works in Fukuoka Prefecture was the original target for the second atomic bomb, but because of cloud cover, Nagasaki was razed instead.

Like the rest of Japan, Kyushu recovered quickly, rebuilding and expanding industry in the postwar years. Since then the region has been working hard to position itself as a top destination for domestic and foreign tourists. The arrival of the Shinkansen in 2004 has made the southern island more accessible than ever: board a bullet train in Kyoto, and you'll barely have time to crack a bento box and down a Kirin before you pull into Hakata Station.

Despite the ease of access, just 3 percent of American tourists in Japan ever make it to Kyushu, something that will feel like a gross oversight to anyone who has spent time in the region. This is a land for coastal cruising and mountain bounding, for hot mud baths and cold potato liquor. Above all, it's a place to eat. In Kagoshima in the south, the list of local specialties (black-footed pigs, fried fish cakes, tiny, sweet sardines) is exceeded only by the world-class shochu on offer at every bar and restaurant. In Miyazaki, on the southwestern coast where Japan's surfing community chases the country's best break, chicken is king, from blackened, charcoal-coated thighs to the scourge of Western hygienic sensibilities, chicken sashimi.

Fukuoka dusk reflected in the Naka River; nightlife here is among the best in Japan.

(Matt Goulding)

But Fukuoka is the center of island life—gastronomically and otherwise. The island's capital was originally divided into two urban centers: Fukuoka for the well-to-do to the west of the Nakagawa River, and Hakata for the common folk settled in the east. The two were officially merged in 1889, but the two names are still used by locals and urban planners (who named the airport after the former and the train station after the latter).

It's a city with a broad yet gentle appeal—not a love-at-first-sight destination, but a slow-burn kinda place.
Monocle
named it the tenth most livable city in the world in its 2014 survey, a fact you're likely to hear repeated more than a few times while in town. Indeed, on paper, it stacks up favorably to any city you know: great weather, lovely coastline, plenty of parks and open spaces, fantastic food, electric nightlife. Unlike other parts of Japan, which can strike visitors as wondrous, fantastical places, spend a few days in Fukuoka and you might find yourself saying, “I could see myself living here . . .”

Here with the high-skirts and hustlers working the corners of Naksu. Here with the hipsters and the bookworms buying jean jackets and sipping matcha lattes on the narrow streets of Daimyo. Here with the tuna-cheeked businessmen bellying up to the
yatai
, the local street food vendors, for one last round and a bowl of something warm before heading home. Fukuoka has an edge, a certain samurai resistance about it, and nowhere is the spirit of
nonconformity more apparent than in its street-food scene.

Fukuoka is the last bastion of
yatai
culture in Japan, a reminder of a past when all of Japan's most famous foods—sushi, soba, skewers—could be found at these pushcart street stands. While
yatai
have effectively been banned across Japan, you will still find them all around Fukuoka, gathered in clusters along the river and in pockets of city nightlife centers like Tenjin and Nagahama. They take shape every evening at dusk and disappear every morning at dawn, and in the hours between they serve everything from
oden
and yakitori to craft cocktails and escargot.

Kamimura takes me to his favorite
yatai
, a collection of covered stands next to a famous shrine where the owner works the crowd in a full kimono and headband. Most
yatai
seat eight people hip to hip, but this is Fukuoka's largest, a tented stand that could house your high school algebra class. It's early by
yatai
standards, but the group of young suits next to us is already soaked in shochu and offers up spirited
kanpai
s when our own drinks arrive. After skewers of grilled chicken parts and a few more rounds of shochu, they pay their bill and move on, but it's clear that a few more
yatai
stops await before the night is through. Kamimura looks almost wistful as he watches them go.

“
Yatai
life is slowly dying in Fukuoka. There used to be three hundred
yatai
. Now there are a hundred and fifty.”
Yatai
have been fighting for survival for the past two decades as business owners have decried their low-rent competitive advantage and local residents have railed against the bad behavior—the noise, the smell, the public urinating—of
yatai
customers, many of them tourists, most of them drunk.

After a few rounds of shochu and some skewers of cheese grilled directly over charcoal, the ramen arrives—a small bowl dotted with bamboo and nori and a single thin slice of roast pork. Kamimura seems to sense my disappointment.

“There are very few
yatai
that serve good ramen. They have limited space, so they use soup and noodles made by someone else. Others have very limited hours so it's impossible to have the same quality as a restaurant. And because it's for after drinking, the style tends to be light. But you have to respect
yatai
for their history and for still being one of the most popular places to eat ramen here.”

Kamimura is an enthusiast, a man who in private will tell you that a noodle should have been a millimeter wider but publicly, on his website and in magazines, will always try to find the positive side behind every bowl. Rather than calling a bowl small or overpriced, he says, “It's perfect for a snack.” Instead of calling a broth overly fatty and without nuance, he'll say “It's best for hardcore
tonkotsu
lovers.”

That's not to say Kamimura's ramen writing isn't deeply informative; the man will lay out details about ingredients and techniques with encyclopedic exactitude. But the overall tone is always one of respect and enthusiasm for the craft. “No matter what happens in my life, ramen has always been there for me.”

This is our fifth bowl of ramen over the past eight hours, and I've reached my limit, but Kamimura shows no sign of slowing down. He looks over at me and eyes the small puddle of pork broth and tiny tangle of noodles before me. “You going to finish that?” It's not a clever technique to inspire me to soldier on; it's a legitimate desire to leave no soup unslurped. For every bowl I eat, Kamimura eats two—not for research (he's been to all of these places dozens of times), not to avoid waste (all nonramen food that makes its way to the table is essentially ignored by him), and certainly not because he's hungry (by my back-of-the-napkin math, he is ingesting north of 5,000 calories' worth of ramen a day during our time together). No, Kamimura does it for the same reason he reviews packaged ramen at home
and feeds his baby boy pork broth and makes his wife pull over every time they drive past an unknown shop: because his dedication to ramen is boundless. He doesn't love ramen like you love pizza or like I love
The Sopranos
; he loves ramen like Antony loved Cleopatra.

In Japanese, you would call Kamimura an
otaku
, one with a deep, abiding dedication to a single topic. A nerd.
Otaku
commonly describes manga fanatics and video game savants. But just like the chefs he admires, Kamimura is a craftsman, and his commitment to ramen writing approaches
shokunin
status, a dedication so all-consuming that everything else in his life is a footnote.

Sometimes, he says, that love may go too deep. Eating more than a bowl of
tonkotsu
a day will wear on a man's body, and Kamimura is no exception. “I've gained ten kilos in the last three years. I'm afraid my blood is more fat than blood now. My doctor is concerned.”

But the torment goes beyond the physical; the knowledge that somewhere, in some corner of Fukuoka or Kyushu beyond, lurks a bowl of unknown provenance and deliciousness is enough to keep a man like Kamimura up until the small hours of the night. When we part each day after our ramen adventures, there's a hint of sadness in his demeanor, as if he thought our hunt would go on forever. When he waves good night, it's not with an open palm but with two fingers pressed together like chopsticks, which he shovels toward his mouth.

米 麺 魚

The earliest footprints of ramen in Japan can be found around the turn of the century, as Chinese migrants in areas like Yokohama, Hakodate, and Nagasaki, the first ports opened to the outside world after hundreds of years of isolationism, began selling the soup to construction workers. Back then it was called
shina soba
, “Chinese noodles,” and was sold mostly from street carts and, oddly enough, Western-style restaurants. The dish was a humble convergence of noodles and a light salt-based broth, but also a sign of Japan's shifting eating habits, one that signaled an increasing appetite for wheat and meat.

Kamimura Toshiyuki working on one of his four hundred annual bowls of ramen.

(Matt Goulding)

Whatever it might have been before the war, the events that took place between 1937 and 1945 would put ramen culture on an entirely different trajectory. Strict food rationing meant
shina soba
all but disappeared during World War II. When the atomic dust finally settled, the Americans moved in and began to reshape Japanese eating habits in profound ways.

Japan had long struggled to feed its own citizens, given its small land mass and high population density. But with the country pockmarked by fire bombings and much of the young male population lost to the war, the Japanese became deeply reliant on American supplies as they fought to ward off starvation. Chief among the imports: American wheat and lard, the basis for a bowl of ramen.