The Ramen King and I (17 page)

When he called out to me in New Osaka Station, Zen was wearing a maroon Banana Republic dress shirt that, he later told me, had been selected by his image consultant. It struck me that he resembled Ernie from Sesame Street. My hair was thinning in front, and I was starting to look like Bert.

“Hey, Zen.”

We shook hands. Zen rarely bowed.

“Hey, man,” he said. “This is for you.”

Zen presented me with a small shopping bag, and opening it, I found that it contained a copy of his new book. Titled
Wow Method
, it embodied the philosophy of his management coaching practice. Like most new books in Japan, Zen’s came sheathed in a marketing banner. This one said, “You can’t change your life just by reading a book!”

Which was clearly meant to imply that you could.

“So, Andy. What are you doing in Japan?”

I was hungry. “Let’s get something to eat and I’ll tell you about it.”

I had visited Zen in Japan once before, in Tokyo, and we had spent two hours trying to find a restaurant. He would suggest places, but I kept nixing them, hoping for something better. We searched until we got so hungry that we had to settle for the nearest yakitori bar. After a mediocre meal of skewered grilled meats, I said, “I guess there’s a cost in not choosing quickly.” To which Zen replied, “You just figured that out?”

This time I was better prepared. On the way to the station, I had stopped by the Internet café and scanned Chowhound’s international message board. An American exchange student had posted about an Osaka liquor store with a trapdoor that led to an exclusive sake-tasting cellar. The store’s Web site listed rules governing the behavior of tasting patrons, such as “Conversation should center around sake. Work-related conversation is prohibited.”

I told Zen about the place, and he said, “Wow.”

We hailed a cab and when we arrived, it looked like any other liquor store, until the young male owner opened a hatch in the floor. We shinnied down to the basement, where the owner led us through a network of white catacomb-like tunnels lined with sakes from all over Japan. We chose several bottles, carrying them out to a round table, where the owner poured samples into small ceramic cups. Our conversation was borderline work-related, but we spoke in English, so the owner didn’t give us any trouble.

“What are you doing here?” Zen asked again. “Magazine story?”

“Not a magazine story. Do you know about Momofuku Ando?”

Ando wasn’t exactly the Bill Gates of Japan, but he was generally known as a famous entrepreneur.

“The guy who invented the noodles?”

“Yeah.”

“What about him?”

“I’m here to meet him.”

“What for?”

Zen was one of the closest people in my life. Still, I wasn’t ready to tell him about Matt and the letters to Ando. My answer was truthful nonetheless.

“I’m not sure.”

“Wow. When is your appointment?”

“I don’t have an appointment.”

“Wow.”

The first bottle we tasted was an Urakasumi
junmai,
from Miyagi Prefecture. In my journal I wrote, “textbook green apple flavor.” I related to Zen what had happened so far, and told him about Ando’s shack and the museum.

“Just hearing about that shack makes me want to build one in my own backyard and spend a year in it inventing something,” Zen said. “It’s really giving me a hard-on.”

The “hard-on” comment was an inside joke. When the venture capitalists politely asked me to replace myself as CEO, Zen and I interviewed several candidates. One was a middle-aged woman who shared her vision for the company over a sushi lunch. Zen and I were excited by her ideas, and near the end of the meal, Zen told her so. “You know, talking to you is really giving me a hard-on,” he declared. The woman nearly choked on a bite of tuna, and later, I asked Zen what he was thinking. He told me that he was under the impression that
hard-on
could be used to express excitement of any kind, and in polite conversation. He had apparently gotten that idea from a movie. “You know, like in
Top Gun
,” he said, and he described a scene in which a U.S. Air Force gunner utters the phrase while firing on a target. I’ve never seen
Top Gun
, so I don’t know if it’s true. Needless to say, the woman didn’t take the job.

The cellar rules prohibited the consumption of any food except
umeboshi
and Kinzanji miso—a chunky fermented bean paste from Wakayama Prefecture. We ordered an appetizer-size portion of both.

“Do you think he’s going to meet you?” Zen asked.

“It’s not looking good. His PR flak is not exactly giving me a warm-and-fuzzy.”

Zen scratched his forehead.

“Andy, how fast did you put on your underwear this morning?”

“Huh?”

“Gimme the book.”

It took a second to realize that Zen was talking about his book. I handed
Wow Method
back to him, and he opened it to page 29.

“Read this,” he said.

In big, bold characters, the writing on page 29 said, “From one to ten, how would you rate the speed at which you put on your underwear this morning?” An explanation was on page 30. The idea was that your underwear-speed rating correlated to your excitement about starting the day. Zen postulated in the book that if you rated yourself each morning, you would begin to naturally make choices in your life that improved your score.

“The day will come when you will give yourself an eleven,” he had written. “It would not be surprising if you scored thirty, or even three hundred.”

I tasted a shot of a
daiginjo
from Nagano Prefecture while thinking back to getting dressed in the morning. The sake was sweet and smooth, and it smelled like bananas.

I gave myself a nine.

“Good,” Zen said. “You’re on the right track.”

For dinner, we ate mackerel and smelt at a grill restaurant around the corner. I ordered a side of
shiokara
—squid fermented in, among other things, its own guts—and Zen accused me of ordering it to impress our cute waitress. Truth be told, the purplish, slimy delicacy looks like the rotting innards of a small mammal, and the first time I laid eyes on it, I nearly threw up. But I had truly come to love it, and I didn’t feel the need to write anything to Momofuku Ando.

“I really love that stuff,” I told Zen.

“Sure you do,” he said.

After dinner, I escorted Zen to New Osaka Station, where he caught a bullet train back to Tokyo. Then I walked to my hotel, stopping off at the Internet café to print out directions to the Instant Ramen Invention Museum.

T
hrough his businesses ventures, Ando made friends in positions of power. One was Fusanosuke Kuhara, owner of Hitachi Mine (out of which grew the electronics giant Hitachi). After the war, Kuhara counseled Ando that in times of uncertainty it was always best to buy land.

Ando followed Kuhara’s advice. With the economy in shambles, landowners were so desperate to sell that buildings in downtown Osaka went for as little as forty dollars. Ando bought three stores in the Shinsaibashi district, next to the busy Sogo department store, and two parcels of land in another downtown neighborhood.

The land purchases—combined with insurance payouts covering his losses during the war—made Ando even richer than before. In just a few years, his net worth would total over forty million yen (the modern equivalent of several hundred million dollars); at least one major newspaper declared him the wealthiest man in postwar Japan. Returning with his family to Osaka, he built a new home in Izumi-Otsu, close to the shore of Osaka Bay. He describes moving day in both
Conception of a Fantastic Idea
and
Magic Noodles
, but there is a slight discrepancy between the accounts. First, the passage from
Conception of a Fantastic Idea
, published in 1983:

Here’s the account that appears in
Magic Noodles,
published in 2002:

In the second book, there is the crowded train, the broken window, and the Nankai Line.

But Ando’s son Hirotoshi is missing.

I
got dressed (underwear speed: 9.5) and ate salmon-filled rice balls at the park near the 7-Eleven. In New Osaka Station, I stood for a few minutes under the air-conditioning vent before following signs to the Hankyu Railway, where I boarded the Takarazuka Line for Ikeda City.

Nestled near the base of Mount Satsuki, Ikeda City boasts a zoo and the remains of a castle built in the Edo period, when the region was famous for its high-quality charcoal. In modern times, it’s probably best known for Ando’s invention. A year before my visit, the city had been the setting of a popular TV drama about the Iwatas, a fictional 1950s family that owned a Western-style bakery. The family received occasional visits from a Mr. Anzai, a neighbor obsessed with inventing an instant version of ramen. The family would offer Mr. Anzai (whose character was clearly based on Ando) bread from their bakery, but he always said that he preferred noodles.

The ride took twenty minutes. When I walked through the ticket-collection turnstile at Ikeda Station, a sign in front of me said INSTANT RAMEN INVENTION MUSEUM. Following a large arrow, I descended a staircase to street level. Convenience stores, supermarkets, and restaurants hugged the station, just like in any other Japanese suburb. Overlapping recordings of female voices screaming
“Irasshaimasse!”
welcomed customers into the various establishments. A large sign on the street directed me to the museum, and as I got farther from the station, the commercial district yielded to a more residential one. Homes were large by Japanese standards, with gardens and garages.

A sign on the lawn said THE MOMOFUKU ANDO INSTANT RAMEN MUSEUM, and squiggly lines ran through the words like a postage cancellation mark. (Later I learned that these squiggly lines were meant to represent both ramen noodles and “the free, unconstrained spirit of invention.”) The museum’s modern, glass facade might have seemed more at home on Fifth Avenue than on a quiet street in a Japanese suburb. The
Nikkei Business
article stated that the museum had been constructed opposite Ando’s home, so before entering, I walked across the street. The two-story residence there was almost entirely hidden from view by a well-maintained Japanese garden, but an ANDO nameplate confirmed I was in the right place. A sturdy metal gate—with spikes on top—blocked the entrance. Through the gate, I could see a red brick driveway leading to the front door, and a basketball net perched on a pole. I tried to imagine the inventor of instant ramen playing basketball with his grandchildren, but since he was ninety-four, maybe he just watched. The
Go Forth
hosts would have rung the doorbell, but I was afraid that Yamazaki might hear about it. Instead I just snapped photos with my digital camera and walked back across the street to the museum.

Near the entrance, a black stone sculpture sat on a granite base. The sculpture was shaped like a bowl of ramen, and the base was engraved with Ando’s words:

I thought about the words. If I was not mistaken, Ando was taking credit for accelerating the cultural progress of mankind.

Once inside the museum, I spotted Yamazaki in the gift shop. He was standing between a rack of Nissin T-shirts and a stuffed-animal version of the Chikin Ramen mascot—a Tweety Bird-like baby chicken. Nearby, a vending machine dispensed various flavors of Cup Noodles.

“Good morning, Mr. Raskin.”

“Good morning!”

“Let’s get started.”

I followed Yamazaki up a staircase to the second floor, where around thirty Japanese second graders were busy making their own packages of Chikin Ramen. Sitting at long tables in a room that resembled a school cafeteria, the kids rolled out dough and fed it through hand-cranked noodle-cutting machines. Adult staffers steamed and fried the noodles while the kids decorated their Chikin Ramen packages with magic markers.

“Wouldn’t it be great if your company’s chairman were here today?” I said to Yamazaki.

He either didn’t hear me, or pretended not to hear me.

One of the girls making Chikin Ramen looked older than the other children, and a photographer was hovering around her. Yamazaki told me that she was an actress, and that she had appeared in the TV drama about the fictional family in Ikeda City.

I asked the girl what she thought of Chikin Ramen.

“It’s soooo good!” she said. “Why don’t you make your own?”

I asked Yamazaki if I could make my own package of Chikin Ramen.

“You need a reservation,” he said. “And we’re booked up for the next month, so it will be very difficult.”

There were only three days left in my vacation.

Yamazaki led me back downstairs to the museum’s main hall, which was packed with various ramen-themed exhibits. A life-size statue of a woman shopping for instant ramen in a supermarket stood near the entrance. Behind her, a glass case displayed Cup Noodles containers from all over the world.