Rice, Noodle, Fish (21 page)

But I'm not so sure Kamimura is convinced. It's clear that he respects Irie's talent and his desire to innovate, but Kamimura is a
tonkotsu
purist, a man who would rather pay 400 yen for a bowl of pork bones and store-bought soy sauce than twice that much for a bowl refined down to its last milliliter. Ramen should be made by blue-collar cooks, not white-collar chefs. Most of the men in Fukuoka might agree, judging by the crowds I see gathered around places like Ganso and Shin Shin, classic joints serving throwback bowls for throwback prices.

But that's clearly not the audience Irie is aiming for.
Tonkotsu
has always been an almost all-male sport, but look around Genei and you see a different clientele entirely: couples, single women, families—signs of a shifting culture.

“There are two methods to develop a ramen shop in Fukuoka,” says Kamimura. “The first is to provide a single taste and dedicate yourself just to that taste. The second way is to offer a
variety of flavors and changing menus. At least Hide-Chan and Genei keep their classic ramen while they experiment with new flavors. It has to be that way, because that brings in a wider variety of clientele.”

Irie serves me three ramens, including a bowl made with a rich dashi and head-on shrimp and another studded with spicy ground pork and wilted spinach and lashed with chili oil. Both are exceptionally delicious, sophisticated creations, but it's his interpretation of
tonkotsu
that leaves me muttering softly to myself. The noodles are firm and chewy, the roast pork is striped with soft deposits of warm fat, and the toppings—white curls of shredded spring onion, chewy strips of bamboo, a perfect square of toasted seaweed—are skillfully applied. Here it is the combination of
tare
, the culmination of years of careful tinkering, and broth, made from whole pig heads and knots of ginger, that defies the laws of
tonkotsu
: a soup with the savory, meaty intensity of a broth made from a thousand pigs that's light enough to leave you wanting more. And more. And more.

“I have no doubt that I make the best bowl of ramen in Japan,” Irie says. Fighting words, to be sure, but the man may have a point.

米 麺 魚

Tonkotsu
, like many of the world's great dishes, was born out of a happy accident. The idea of replacing traditional chicken bones with pork bones was already in practice in Kurume in the early 1930s, adapted from the Chinese in nearby Nagasaki. As the story has it, one night an old cook at a
yatai
left the soup on the stove too long, turning the broth thick and cloudy with melted marrow and porky intensity. It caught on quickly, spreading from
yatai
to
yatai
, and soon double-boiled pork-bone soup became the official ramen of Kyushu.

At the Kurume train station, twenty-five miles south of Fukuoka, a miniature bronze replica of the original
yatai
stands as a reminder to all of where one of Japan's most famous dishes comes from. Kamimura takes me by the statue to pay our respects to ramen history, but he talks grimly about Kurume's ramen scene. He speaks of a ramen town where nobody gets along, where factional beefs and claims to history cloud the already cloudy soup, a town where the shop that invented
tonkotsu
can't even make a decent bowl anymore. (Which is why we're genuflecting to the statue instead of the still-operational original
yatai
.)

But the trip isn't merely a historical pilgrimage; Kurume still claims a few of Kamimura's favorite shops. We start at Rai Fuku Ken, a tiny shop next to the train station that has been serving
tonkotsu
since shortly after it was invented down the street. The owner, Akira Yoshino, is a second-generation shop owner and the current president of the Kurume
Tonkotsu
Ramen Association. Round-faced and rosy-cheeked, with a black bandanna tied tightly across his forehead, Yoshino views himself as a guardian of the true
tonkotsu
.

“I'm proud to know that ramen has spread to places like New York and Europe,” he says, “but Kurume people like Kurume ramen, and the style that people around the world know as
tonkotsu
is not the original
tonkotsu
. We care only about keeping the soul of Kurume ramen alive.”

His is a Goldilocks bowl: medium body, golden in color, made from all parts of the pig cooked over twenty-four hours with nothing but water from the Chikobe River nearby. It asserts itself, coats your throat on the way down, but it doesn't stick to your ribs the way the most intense bowls do.

It's the next stop, though, that I've been waiting for. Kamimura has been whispering all week of a sacred twenty-four-hour ramen spot located on a two-lane highway in Kurume where truckers go for the taste of true ramen. The shop is massive by ramen standards, big enough to fit a few trucks along with those drivers, and in the midafternoon a loose assortment of castaways and road warriors sit slurping their noodles. Near the entrance a thick, sweaty cauldron boils so aggressively that a haze of pork fat hangs over the kitchen like waterfall mist.

The same stock has been simmering at Maruboshi since 1955.

(Matt Goulding)

While few are audacious enough to claim ramen is healthy,
tonkotsu
enthusiasts love to point out that the collagen in pork bones is great for the skin. “Look at their faces!” says Kamimura. “They're almost seventy years old and not a wrinkle! That's the collagen. Where there is
tonkotsu
, there is rarely a wrinkle.”

He's right: the woman wears a faded purple bandanna and sad, sunken eyes, but even then she doesn't look a day over fifty. She's stirring a massive metal cauldron of broth, and I ask her how long it's been simmering for.

“Sixty years,” she says flatly.

This isn't hyperbole, not exactly. Kurume treats
tonkotsu
like a French country baker treats a sourdough starter—feeding it, regenerating, keeping some small fraction of the original soup alive in perpetuity. Old bones out, new bones in, but the base never changes. The mother of all ramen.

Maruboshi Ramen opened in 1958, and you can taste every one of those years in the simple bowl they serve. There is no fancy
tare
, no double broth, no secret spice or unexpected toppings: just pork bones, noodles, and three generations of constant simmering.

The flavor is pig in its purest form, a milky white broth with no aromatics or condiments to mitigate the purity of its porcine essence. Up until now, Kamimura has worked his way through bowls of ramen with the methodical persistence of a librarian cataloging books, but something in him changes with the first slurp of Maruboshi's bowl. His eyes light up, he wiggles his shoulders, and a childish smile breaks out across his face. “What do you think? What do you think?”

For Kamimura, it's not just a strength thing—it's a soul thing. He
respects craftsmen like Hideto and Irie, but their calculated compositions don't move him the same way that a straight bowl of bone broth does. It takes time to draw out the soul of ramen—some say hours; others, like Kamimura, say lifetimes.

When the owners spot Kamimura, they hurry over to our booth, offering paper cups of coffee to go with our mystic soup. Kamimura mentions that he's been reviewing more instant ramen than ever lately, and the woman disappears and comes back with a cardboard box stacked with sixteen individual packets of Maruboshi's take-home product. But his attention isn't with the owners or the packaged noodles or the steaming cups of coffee. No, it's aimed squarely at me. He catches my eyes, then looks down at my unfinished bowl, then back up at me. I know what he wants, and after twenty-eight bowls over the course of five days, I'm more than happy to give it to him, but first, he needs to ask.

“You going to finish that?”

 

(Matt Goulding)

Japan is a land of a million bowls of ramen. With over 200,000 shops and a world of microtrends and funky innovations, ramen is Japan's most personalized and boundless staple. Behind the specialty bowls, though, there are at least twenty-two accepted regional styles of ramen that bring order to the complex noodle ecosystem. Here, in part, are the most famous of Japan's regional ramen species.

HAKODATE SHIO

As one of Japan's first ports open to the outside world, Hakodate has a long ramen history. Light and clear like consommé,
shio
(salt) ramen is the closest reflection of the original Chinese ramen.

Where to eat: Ebisuken (Hakodate), Afuri (Tokyo)

(Michael Magers, lead photographer)