The Ramen King and I (14 page)

It had been ten years since my failure to fill in the blank while screaming the
Go Forth
line in front of the Kmart Corporate Head, and even longer since I had watched the TV show. Nevertheless, I began recalling the ramen-related things that had happened of late: the recipe from Grandma Sylvia’s recipe box; the writer who had left an instant ramen recommendation on my voice mail; Murakami’s song; Ellen’s friend who wrote songs about instant ramen; and now Carla’s suggestion. As I thought about these things, I heard a loud voice in my head telling me to ignore them. I had not yet learned to really listen to this voice, but it must have been saying something like this:

I was not able to hear these words yet, like I said. All I knew was that I felt like an idiot for wanting what I wanted. Maybe because Carla and Ellen were splashing water in my face, though, I stayed awake to my desire, and eventually I found the strength to stand up on one of the lounge chairs. My shorts and T-shirt were soaking wet, but I screamed the line so loud that all of Silicon Valley could have heard me.

“I wanna make instant ramen with Momofuku Ando!”

 

 

 

T
here wasn’t much time left in my vacation, and I did not have an appointment.

D
uring the war, Japan tightly regulated the manufacture and distribution of textiles, making it difficult for Ando to conduct business, so he expanded into other areas.

He launched a company to make slide projectors, which the government used to train unskilled workers at munitions factories. In nearby Hyogo Prefecture, he purchased a sixty-one-acre mountain and turned it into charcoal, which he sold as fuel. With a business partner, he manufactured prefabricated air-raid shelters.

The war made Ando rich. But as he writes in many of his books, the good times were about to end.

“I did not realize that an unimaginable misfortune was awaiting me around the corner.”

W
hen I got home from house-sitting with Ellen and Carla, I still wasn’t sure that I was going to try to meet Ando without an appointment. But then I thought again about the recipe box and the voice mail from the writer in Chicago and Haruki Murakami’s song, and I wondered if Momofuku Ando was indeed showing me how to live. It was a preposterous idea, but I enjoyed believing it, so I traded in my frequent flier miles for a round-trip ticket to Osaka. The next morning, I bought ten installments of
Ramen Discovery Legend
at the Japan Center bookstore, stuffing them into my suitcase. On the way to the airport, I called Matt and told him where I was going. He had never heard of anyone trying to meet the person they had chosen to stand in for God, but he wished me luck.

“May the noodles be with you,” he said.

He was a big fan of
Star Wars
.

United Airlines offered a choice between an American-style meal and a Japanese-style one. I chose Japanese-style, but the rice was cold and dried out. I couldn’t watch the movie without feeling bad, so I pulled Book Two of
Ramen Discovery Legend
from my carry-on.

The episode I read was set at night, with Fujimoto cooking ramen at his stand in the park. There’s a portable TV near his stove, and he’s watching an interview with a ramen “producer” named Mr. Serizawa. An investor in several top-tier ramen shops (and a skilled ramen chef in his own right), Serizawa asserts in the interview that too many young men are being deluded by dreams of
dassara
and betting their lives on ramen. “They study ramen on the Internet and in ramen magazines,” he says, “and some of them eventually learn how to make good ramen. But ‘good’ won’t cut it in this world.”

Was I deluding myself that I could change?

Among the periodicals in the seat pocket, I found an issue of
President
, a Japanese men’s magazine. The cover headline said,
“Sanju-dai no kachikata.”
“How to Win in Your Thirties.” Even without opening the magazine, I was pretty sure that reading ramen comic books and trying to meet the inventor of instant ramen without an appointment would not be among the recommended activities. I thought about all of the times I had traveled to Japan, and I realized that I had never flown into Osaka.

I didn’t know much about the area except for stereotypes. Osakans are supposed to be friendlier and more outwardly emotional than Tokyoites, and the city is famous for the street smarts of its merchants. (A traditional local greeting literally translates as “You makin’ money?”) A disproportionate number of Japanese comedians speak the brash, guttural Osaka dialect. The only time I had ever lived in the Kansai area—the region on the western side of Honshu centered around Kyoto and Osaka—was when my Japanese teacher in graduate school sent me and four classmates to Kyoto to improve our Japanese. We stayed in a college dorm, and every day, we toured the city with an expert in a different field. An architect led us through a centuries-old
nagaya
—a long, narrow dwelling—and an archaeologist gave us a tour of several
kofun
—burial mounds the length of football fields that began appearing in Japan in the third century. Other expert guides included a doll artist, a woodworker, and a tofu maker. On the last day, as a surprise, our teacher put us on a bus to Enryakuji, a Zen temple atop Mount Hiei, where my classmates and I were forced to endure twenty-four hours of
zazen kunren
(Zen sitting training) with monks of the Tendai sect. Along with the five of us, seventy-five teenage boys—new employees of a gas station chain—participated in the training as a corporate initiation ritual. The monks showed us how to clasp our hands together in the
gassho
pose and to sit on our heels with our shins under our thighs—what the Japanese call
seiza
-style. I found it incredibly painful, and my classmate Barry, an amateur bodybuilder with oversized thigh muscles, moaned in agony. While enduring the pain, we had to chant along with the monks.

“En-Don-Sha-Shou-En-Ji-Sou-Zou-Kyou-Soku . . .”

The head monk explained the chant’s meaning (which is also summarized on the Enryakuji Web site): “It is the darkness of your heart that leads to enlightenment.” We had to sit
seiza
-style while he lectured us, and we were forbidden to speak during meals. At night we slept alongside the young gas station attendants on thin futons spread out on a tatami-covered floor. The monks made it clear that we were not supposed to talk after lights-out, but once it was dark, some of the gas station attendants crawled over to where my friends and I were sleeping and asked what we were doing in a Zen temple. We told them that we were forced to be there by our teacher. They said that they were forced to be there by their gas station company, and having bonded in this way, three of the boys asked to arm wrestle Barry. He beat them all—at the same time.

It was difficult not to question myself. I was on a plane to Osaka so that I could try to meet the inventor of instant ramen—to whom I had been praying because I was cheating in relationships and obsessively dating—without an appointment. I had brought a map showing the location of Nissin headquarters, but what would I say when I got there? I had no idea. Normally I prepared long lists of questions before interviewing an executive. I had nothing.

To calm myself, I rummaged through my carry-on bag for the
Nikkei Business
article and reread a section about Ando that I found comforting. It described a famous, long-ago incident in which an executive at Mitsubishi, Nissin’s first big distributor, boasted that Mitsubishi could source everything “from ramen to missiles.” Upon hearing that, Ando reportedly complained that the Mitsubishi executive should have said “from missiles to ramen,” because ramen was the more important of the two.

As the plane made its final approach into Kansai International Airport, I looked out the window and saw whitecaps breaking over the Pacific Ocean. Would it be odd to say that they reminded me of drops of lard on top of a bowl of soy-sauce ramen? Well, they sort of did.

T
his is the story of how Ando was arrested by the Japanese military police.

During World War II, one of his companies produced engine parts as a subcontractor for Kawanishi Kokuki, a maker of combat seaplanes. Because the parts were for military use, the government supplied raw materials and performed a thorough inventory check every month.

One day (on this point, all of Ando’s autobiographies concur), an employee in the company’s accounting department informed Ando of a problem.

“The numbers don’t look right,” the man said. “It seems that someone is selling the inventory illegally.”

Perhaps Ando is exaggerating when he states in
Conception of a Fantastic Idea
that the climate of World War II Japan was such that a man could be put to death if found guilty of misappropriating government property. In any case, he quickly reported the matter to the Osaka Police Department, where he was told to discuss it with the military police. At a military police station in Otemae, not far from Osaka Castle, Ando was greeted by a man he refers to in his autobiographies as Corporal K.

“Please wait,” Corporal K said.

Ando waited, uneasily, in the military police station for what seemed like hours. “At the time,” he writes, “a military police station was a place where even the devil feared to tread.”

When Corporal K returned, he led Ando into a small room and began interrogating him.

“You’re really something,” Corporal K said. “You commit a crime and try to blame it on someone else. It’s you who’s been selling the parts on the black market, isn’t it?”

K
ansai International Airport was only ten years old and everything was clean and new. The terminal was one big, shiny electronic gadget.

I found my suitcase on the carousel and passed through customs. I hadn’t slept on the plane, but I wasn’t tired. On the contrary, I was excited. I was excited to see advertisements in Japanese and newspapers in Japanese. I was excited to read signs in Japanese. I was excited to be surrounded by Japanese people speaking and sending text messages in Japanese on sleek Japanese cell phones.

I followed signs to the Japan Railways ticket office, where I reserved a seat on the Haruka Express Line to downtown Osaka. The man who sold me the ticket complimented my Japanese.
“Iya, hotondo wasureta kedo,”
I said, waving my hand in front of my face. When someone compliments your Japanese, it’s polite to wave your hand in front of your face and say that, no, you have forgotten nearly everything. The truth was that I had forgotten many things, but hardly everything.

To reach the train platform, I had to first step outside the airport terminal. As I approached the exit, two glass doors parted automatically, and the rush of hot air made me sweat on impact. Osaka was like an oven. Making my way down an escalator, I cursed myself for trying to meet the inventor of instant ramen in July.

On the Haruka Express Line platform, I bought a bottle of C.C. Lemon from a vending machine, recalling how Harue and I used to sing the C.C. Lemon jingle, which was just the thirst quencher’s name repeated over and over by a female singer who affected a Katharine Hepburn-like voice tremor. I held the bottle to my forehead to cool off. When the train doors opened for boarding, I rushed onto my assigned, air-conditioned car, and sat in my assigned seat.

The train was another shiny new gadget. Like all trains in Japan, it rode silently, with no shakes or jolts. This one ran on an elevated track, its tinted windows framing the Osaka skyline, which was not unlike the Tokyo skyline. There were apartment buildings and office towers as far as I could see, which was not that far because of the smog. Billboards on the tops of buildings advertised consumer loans and “capsule hotels”—the ultralow-budget hospitality option in which guests spend the night in stacked fiberglass tubes. (Think coffin, with a television at your feet.) Text of the day’s news stories scrolled along an LED display over the train’s bathroom. “Sumo’s Asashoryu Apologizes for Drunken Rampage.” “Hiroshima Officials Receive Suspended Sentences for Embezzlement.” “Ichiro Extends U.S. Hitting Streak to Eighteen Games.” A young woman in a beige uniform wheeled a snack cart through the aisle. “Cold oolong tea,” she said in the high-pitched voice of Japanese women who sell things. “Rice balls. Mandarin oranges.” Finding no takers, she pushed the cart to the end of the car and turned around, bowing to me and my fellow passengers. It struck me that only in a country where snack vendors must bow before leaving a train car will you find a television show about two hosts who scream, “I wanna ___!” (The converse, I surmised, might also be true.) Out the window, I noticed a grassy park with a baseball diamond. The train was moving so fast that I barely saw it, but before the park whizzed by, I watched a man throw a ball for his dog to fetch in left field. The scene was so familiar, so un-foreign. I imagined that the man knew I was on my way to meet the inventor of instant ramen without an appointment, and that he was telepathically telling me it was a waste of time.