This article is about the Japanese noodle dish. Ramen has its roots soba noodles whole foods Chinese noodle dishes.
However, historian Barak Kushner argues that this borrowing occurred retroactively and that various independent Japanese corruptions of Chinese words had already led to Japanese people calling this Chinese noodle dish “ramen”. According to historians, the more plausible theory is that ramen was introduced to Japan in the late 19th or early 20th centuries by Chinese immigrants living in Yokohama Chinatown. Asakusa, Tokyo, where the Japanese owner employed twelve Cantonese cooks from Yokohama’s Chinatown and served the ramen arranged for Japanese customers. By 1900, restaurants serving Chinese cuisine from Guangzhou and Shanghai offered a simple dish of noodles, a few toppings, and a broth flavored with salt and pork bones. Many Chinese living in Japan also pulled portable food stalls, selling ramen and gyōza dumplings to workers. After Japan’s defeat in World War II, the American military occupied the country from 1945 to 1952.
In the same period, millions of Japanese troops returned from China and continental East Asia from their posts in the Second Sino-Japanese War. Some of them would have been familiar with wheat noodles. In 1958, instant noodles were invented by Momofuku Ando, the Taiwanese-Japanese founder and chairman of Nissin Foods. Beginning in the 1980s, ramen became a Japanese cultural icon and was studied around the world. At the same time, local varieties of ramen were hitting the national market and could even be ordered by their regional names. A ramen museum opened in Yokohama in 1994. Today ramen is one of Japan’s most popular foods, with Tokyo alone containing around 5,000 ramen shops, and more than 24,000 ramen shops across Japan.