The Ramen King and I (16 page)

T
he building was around fifteen stories high, its exterior covered in smooth olive-green tiles. It was probably constructed in the 1970s. Apart from the kanji characters for “Nissin Food Products” and Nissin’s bowl-shaped logo near the top, the structure could just as easily have housed an insurance company. At street level, a gray slate walkway led to two red marble steps.

As I walked up the steps, the glass doors in front of me parted automatically.

The lobby stretched the full dimensions of the building, its floor comprised of the same red marble as the steps. The wall opposite the entrance was all glass; through it, I could see a rock garden and small koi pond. In the center of the lobby, two Greek-style sculptures, chiseled from what appeared to be white marble, stood on three-foot-high pedestals. I approached the sculptures and, for a minute or so, lingered between them. The one on my left depicted a naked man (Dionysus?) with his arms around two naked women whose joyful expressions hinted at the planning of, or winding down from, a ménage à trois. The sculpture on my right showed two men. One was curled up in agony, while the other hovered above, twisting the first man’s arm.

It’s hard to believe this now, but I stood between the sculptures completely oblivious to the symbolism.

“Can I help you?”

The voice belonged to an old man sitting behind a reception desk. He wore an armband with the kanji for
security guard
, which made me think again of
Go Forth
. Security personnel were always foiling the hosts’ plans. During the taping of “I wanna be a street vendor and serve yakitori to the mayor of Tokyo!” a member of the production crew was taken into police custody outside City Hall.

“I would like to meet Momofuku Ando,” I said calmly.

The security guard picked up a telephone and dialed a number. There was a long pause.

“There’s a foreigner at the front desk who says he wants to meet the chairman.”

Another pause.

The security guard hung up the phone.

“Please proceed to the twelfth floor.”

I couldn’t believe it had gone so smoothly! Maybe people showed up all the time wanting to meet Momofuku Ando, and it was someone’s job to greet them. The security guard even wrote out a name tag with my name in katakana—the second Japanese syllabary. Katakana symbols are like hiragana ones, except that they’re used mostly for spelling onomatopoeia expressions and transliterating foreign words.

I affixed the name tag to my shirt and walked past the guard’s desk. When I got to the bank of elevators, there was another sculpture, this one a bronze of Ando himself. It depicted the noodle inventor in a graduation-style cap and gown that, according to a plaque, commemorated an honorary PhD that he had received, in 1996, from Ritsumeikan University. Entering an open elevator, I pressed the button for the twelfth floor. The elevator doors closed, and when they opened again, a young woman was standing in front of me. She wore a gray skirt and a white blouse.

“Welcome to Nissin Food Products,” she said, bowing.

 

 

 

I
bowed back, and the woman led me from the elevator into a small room. Ah, the small room near the elevator.

When interviewing executives for magazine articles in the United States, I would often be led through mazes of cubicles on the way to spacious corner offices where the interviews took place. These walkthroughs offered valuable clues about what was going on in a company. Were people hard at work? Did they seem happy? At a troubled investment bank, for instance, I once spied a manager whaling away on a punching bag that hung by his desk. In Japan, though, executives almost always came out to meet me in small rooms near the elevators. It was the physical manifestation of keeping outsiders on the outside.

The small room near the elevator at Nissin was furnished with an expensive sofa and two comfortable-looking chairs. A photograph on the wall of Ando in a red gown and black mortarboard was presumably taken the day he received the honorary doctorate from Ritsumeikan University. Surveying the layout of the sofa and chairs, I knew that I was supposed to sit on the sofa. That’s because it was the farthest piece of furniture from the door. Japanese business etiquette dictates that when you visit a company, you take the seat farthest from the door because the person nearest the door controls the exit, and therefore holds the power. I was showing up without an appointment, without a jacket, and without a tie. I thought about flaunting the seating protocol as well, but I didn’t have the guts.

I sat down on the sofa.

“Would you like some coffee or tea?” the young woman asked.

Sweat had stained an area on my button-down shirt near my solar plexus.

“How about iced tea?” I said.

The woman bowed again, and told me to wait. Five minutes later, a tall, thin man entered the room. He looked around twenty-eight years old and wore a crisp white shirt and a plain green tie. I stood up and he bowed, holding out his business card. He spoke in Japanese.

“I am Yamazaki. Welcome to Nissin.”

This was the man who had stopped returning my e-mails.

“Thank you,” I said. “I am Raskin.”

I thought about apologizing for showing up without an appointment, but decided not to mention it. I did apologize, however, for not having business cards. It was proper that I hadn’t brought any because I was on vacation, but in Japan, it was always good to start by apologizing about something.

Yamazaki apologized in return.

“Osaka is very hot and humid now. I’m sorry you have to endure that.”

The young woman returned with a glass of iced oolong tea, placing it deliberately on the table in front of me. She bowed and left the room again.

“It really is hot,” I agreed. “Yesterday I stood for, like, ten minutes under an air-conditioning vent in New Osaka Station.”

I wasn’t sure if I should have said that.

Yamazaki motioned for me to sit down. He sat, too, in the chair closest to the door.

“So what brings you to Osaka?”

If he only knew. I wondered if he remembered me from our brief e-mail correspondence. When speaking to him, I copied how the security guard referred to Ando just by his title, but I prefaced it with “your company’s” to make it sound more honorific.

“I’m the journalist who contacted you by e-mail a while ago, when I was trying to write a story about your company’s chairman.”

Yamazaki nodded.

“I know.”

He didn’t seem surprised to see me.

“I guess you weren’t able to cooperate on the story,” I said.

“It’s very difficult to arrange interviews with the chairman. He just turned ninety-four.”

“Of course.” I wanted to appear understanding. “I was wondering, though. How did
Nikkei Business
arrange to interview him?”

Yamazaki chuckled through his nose.

“It took some time to set that up.”

“Some time?”

“That reporter applied for an interview when the chairman was eighty-four.”

I tried not to flinch. “I happened to be in Osaka on vacation, so I was thinking that maybe since I was here, it might be possible to visit the Instant Ramen Invention Museum.”

“You can visit the museum anytime,” Yamazaki said. “In fact, I’d be happy to meet you there and show you around.”

I reached for the iced tea and took a sip, gathering my courage.

“I was also wondering if your company’s chairman might be available to make instant ramen with me.”

Yamazaki smiled again, but this time he began sucking air through his teeth.

“That might be difficult,” he said.

In Japan, the sound of air being sucked through teeth means that you are not about to get what you have just asked for. Still, I asked why it might be difficult.

“Because, well, it might be difficult. He’s ninety-four, you know.”

During the six-year run of their show, the
Go Forth
hosts wanted to get treated to meals by wealthy people no fewer than thirteen times. In one episode, the male host traveled several hours by express train to the corporate offices of an entrepreneur said to be one of the richest men in Japan. In addition to wanting the entrepreneur to treat him to lunch, the male host brought along receipts for train fare and asked to be reimbursed for travel expenses. The executive turned out to be away on business, so the male host was greeted by an assistant. “Will you at least consider relaying my requests?” the male host pleaded. The assistant said no, and the male host was forced to hitch-hike back to Tokyo.

Still, I thought it was worth a try.

“Would you at least consider relaying my request to your company’s chairman?” I asked Yamazaki.

The sound of more air being sucked through teeth.

“I’ll talk to my superiors,” he said, “and we’ll consider it.”

He offered again to meet me the next day at the museum, and I figured I would take him up on it. A museum visit under Yamazaki’s guidance could be the beginning of a friendship with him, a way to win his trust so that he would introduce me to Ando. On my way out, I apologized again.

“I’m really sorry for showing up without an appointment.”

While apologizing, I bowed and backed onto the elevator, because in Japan you’re not supposed to break eye contact with the person you’re visiting until the elevator doors close.

“Don’t worry about it,” Yamazaki said. “And have fun in Osaka. See you tomorrow.”

It was still early afternoon, so I walked back to the Internet café, where I e-mailed Zen. “You’re in Osaka?” he replied. “I’ll take a bullet train down to meet you tonight. It will be fun just to see your face.” Jet lag overtook me, and when I got back to the hotel, I fell onto the bed. I slept for four hours.

I
n protest of his treatment in prison, Ando embarked on a hunger strike. He became emaciated and suffered diarrhea.

“I decided that I would rather get sick than remain ‘healthy’ and suffer more torture,” he wrote. “I think I contracted typhoid.”

A fellow prisoner who was about to be released took pity on Ando, asking if there was anything he could do to help. Ando told the man to contact Yasumasa Inoue, a former army lieutenant and a longtime friend.

Inoue arrived the next day and had Ando set free. The prison ordeal had lasted forty-five days, and Ando was so weak that he needed assistance to walk. For two months, he recuperated at Osaka’s Central Hospital. Upon his release, with Allied bombing of the Japanese mainland intensifying, he fled to nearby Hyogo Prefecture.

According to
Magic Noodles
, Lieutenant Inoue also introduced Ando to his wife. Ando never states when the introduction took place, except to note that it happened “during the war” and that it was “love at first sight.” Born in Fukushima Prefecture, Masako “had a strong sense of duty.” A picture, taken on their wedding day, appears in
Magic Noodles
. The kimono-clad young Masako is seated, while Ando, in a dark three-piece suit, stands next to her. A caption reads “Marriage with Masako (Kyoto).”

On March 13, 1945, five months before Japan’s surrender, 329 Allied B-29s firebombed Osaka. According to an American prisoner of war who was held in the city, the raids went on nearly all night, leaving behind a twenty-five-square-mile “smoldering desert.” The Allies bombed Osaka twice more in June, shutting down practically all economic activity. In August—the day after Emperor Hirohito accepted the Potsdam Declaration and ended the war—Ando traveled to Osaka to assess the damage.

Burned corpses still littered the streets. Ando’s aircraft parts factory had been destroyed, as were his offices. While thinking about what to do next, he noticed that black markets for food had begun sprouting up around the city. Months later, at a black market behind Umeda Station, he came face-to-face with his destiny.

Later, colleagues at Nissin said that whenever Ando saw a long line, he would stop what he was doing and investigate. “In a line,” he has written, “you can see the desires of the world.” Still, it would be more than ten years before Ando acted on his observation.

I
didn’t mention this in my letters to Ando because I was writing to him about women, but from the very first time I met Zen, he seemed obsessed with the fact that I am Jewish.

One of his favorite books, he would tell me, was
Business Methods of the Jews
by Den Fujita, the Japanese executive who founded Mc-Donald’s Japan. (Fujita, who died shortly before my trip to meet Ando, was sometimes called “Jew of the Ginza.”) Zen was always threatening to sign up for JDate, insisting that as a Japanese man he was “J” enough. Once, when we both still worked for the Internet company, I attended a Passover seder at a San Francisco synagogue, and Zen asked to tag along. He wore a yarmulke and asked the four questions, and he smacked his lips after his first taste of matzo ball soup. As the female cantor led the congregation in
“Dayenu,”
a traditional Passover song, he tried to follow along in Hebrew. When the song ended, the cantor translated the lyrics. “If God had led us out of Egypt,” she said, “and had not executed judgment upon the Egyptians,
dayenu.
It would have been enough. If He had parted the Red Sea for us, and had not let us through it onto dry land,
dayenu.
It would have been enough.” Later, in my car, Zen said, “Now I see why Jews are so successful. It’s because you’re so demanding.” I didn’t know what he meant by that, so I asked him. It turned out that he had misheard the cantor and thought
dayenu
meant “it would
not
have been enough.” If God had only parted the Red Sea, not enough! I set Zen straight, but he was skeptical. “Do you really think anything short of the Promised Land would have been enough for you guys?”