Nami's Japanese Daily Life! Vol.1: Ramen Culture

Jeez, classic anime? That's really where Mami's going with her article theme? We already got Ami moaning about stuff that happened when we were all riding dinosaurs, and now the kid's pretending she knows what "classic" means? Well, trust yours truly to clue you in on current events, and nothing is bigger in Japan right now than Ramen! Well, except maybe Mr. Big. Can you believe those guys are still touring? Anyway, we had an article about some really, really tasy types of ramen, but this time I'm counting down the five most awesome things about ramen culture!

5. Waiting in Line

Okay, so this part's not, like, %100 awesome. But you have to sit through it for the good stuff, and it's funny. I love being Japanese, but I think if one random person stood behind another random person, after an hour, you'd have a line a mile long figuring there must be something good at the end. The best ramen shops have lines every day, and if some new place is on the news or in a magazine, you can forget getting in without a two-hour wait even if you've been a regular for years. Like, say, you always stopped by this really cool tonkotsu place called Tama-chan every day after archery pratice...then this review showed up in Ramen Walker...then someone started mysteriously shooting arrows through the Ramen Walker office windows every night...not that I'd know a-anything about that

4. Toppings

So, lemme tell about the two ramen places closest to my school. This one charges three hundred yen a bowl. This one, five hundred. The catch? El-Cheapo Ramen charges four hundred for a bowl with takana, that awesome spicy green stuff you can see in the picture. The other place? There's a pot of the stuff and you can shovel as much in your ramen as you want, for free. The coolest places have all kinds of free junk you can add, so no two bowls are ever the same. Some of them just have a basket of eggs you can dunk in if you pay like a hundred yen! Word to the wise, though: don't add the soy sauce or the vinegar, that's for the gyoza sauce.

3. Theme Parks

Yeah, you heard me. Ramen is the only food so great they make actual theme parks for it. I mean there are no rides, just a bunch of ramen restaurants; I guess a bowl of ramen would be a pretty dumb thing to take on a roller coaster. But the inside of the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum on the right there is an exact replica of a street from 1960, the year cup ramen was invented! The Ramen Stadium here in Fukuoka doesn't have a cool gimmick like that, but the ramen's good. That's its shop guide on the left, and yeah, it's in Korean. They have English menus too!

2. Kaedama

  People say things in Japan are small, but that's not true about the portions of some food. Most stuff comes with a freakin' huge bowl of white rice, but when it comes to ramen, is one gigantic bowl not enough for you? Add more noodles! For a hundred yen, they'll give you a kaedama, a whole plate of extra noodles to dump in the soup. It's kind of a Fukuoka thing...I guess sissy, little Tokyo guys don't have the appetite for it~ Hurr, hurr. No seriously, I went there, Tokyo people are lo-osers

1. Ichiran

Oh jeez, what can I say about Ichiran? It reminds me of this funny video my American friend sent me (NSFW) (that means don't click it, Mami, it's got bad words). Ichiran is a ramen restaurant from Fukuoka, but now they're everywhere. Like, seriously, everywhere, and I don't know why. There's like six of them just around Hakata Station. Don't get me wrong, the ramen's okay, but it's not the best or anything. Then I thought about it: Ichiran is for control freaks who hate people, which is hilarious. The thing about Ichiran is, you get to choose everything. How thick the soup is, how spicy, how much green onion, pork or no pork, how hard the noodles are, how much garlic. Which is cool. Then you sit in a booth with walls and never have to look at a human being. The waiter? They lift up that screen halfway to take your order, so you never see their face. Since a lot of people eat ramen drunk out of their minds at 3 a.m. on a Sunday morning, I can see why it's popular. Not that I'd know a-anything about that Ja, ne!~なみ(Nami)