The Ramen King and I (7 page)

A
fter being asked his favorite question in the world, Masa told me that Ramen Jiro was a small restaurant on a triangular plot near the edge of Keio University, the elite school in Tokyo where he had been an undergraduate. Ramen Jiro served ramen, Masa explained, and eating ramen was all anyone did there.

“Yet,” he insisted, “Ramen Jiro is not about ramen.”

I asked what it was about.

“Difficult to explain,” Masa said. He seemed to struggle for the right words. “I guess it’s something on another dimension.”

I ordered more sushi. For the next thirty minutes, Masa related his experiences at Ramen Jiro.

The first time he went, he was a freshman at Keio University. A senior had invited him, explaining on the way to the restaurant what to do and what not to do.

“The first rule,” Masa said, “is that no matter what, you can’t talk to the owner. He’s this serious-looking old man, and you can only talk to him if you’re on the university judo team. That’s because he sometimes works out with those guys. Anyway, I was on the tennis team, so no talking. The second rule is that you can’t leave any noodles or soup in your bowl. That is difficult because regular
chashu men
[a bowl of ramen with roast pork slices on top] usually comes with very thin pork slices. But this guy gives you very thick pork. There is a humongous amount of noodles, and a half-inch-high layer of liquid lard on top.”

“It sounds disgusting,” I said.

“Actually, it is disgusting,” Masa confirmed. “The first time you eat it, you get sick. But the same day, around midnight, you start to feel like, ‘Oh, my God, I wanna eat that again.’ So the next day you go back, and you eat it, and you go, ‘What the heck was I thinking? This is crazy. I don’t want to ever eat this again.’ Then you just keep going in this cycle, until finally you are addicted.”

I ordered cold sake for both of us—a
junmai
from Kochi Prefecture.

Masa explained that the moment of truth in any Jiro visit was when you gave your order. There were basically just two items on the Jiro menu: small and large. What Masa had been talking about so far was the small. As a rule, a first-timer was not supposed to even think about a large, but Masa said the decision was harder than it sounded.

“The wait is always at least forty minutes. Then you finally reach the entrance, and this gray-haired, big-bellied owner looks up from his vat of boiling pig carcasses and says
‘Nani?’
Then you have to say either
‘sho’
(small) or
‘dai’
(large). And even if you’ve made up your mind that there’s no way you could eat a large that day, after standing in line in front of this owner and watching him cook soup for, like, five or ten minutes, you’ll start whispering to yourself, ‘Maybe I can do it! Maybe I can do it!’ And when you’re in that mode, you’re in trouble. Because when he all of a sudden comes at you with
‘Nani?’
you’ll just blurt out
‘dai!’
—large. And then you’ll think, ‘What the hell did I do? I can’t eat that much.’”

“It sounds like you don’t really know what you’re going to do until you come face-to-face with this guy.”

“Exactly. You get in front of him, and you really can’t think straight.”

Masa took a sip of sake and his face turned serious.

“Once, after I finished, like, one-third of the noodles, I felt like I had to go to the bathroom.”

“Is that a problem?”

“There’s actually a bathroom there, but no one uses it.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s too embarrassing! Think about it. Everybody’s waiting forty minutes to get in, and if you make them wait more, the owner’s going to get mad at you. You’re always feeling this kind of pressure. Pressure. Pressure. I started slowing down because I couldn’t finish it, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, how can I get out of this place?’ So I put the pork underneath the noodles, trying to at least hide it, and then I put the bowl on the counter and screamed, ‘Thank you very much—good-bye!’ And I just ran away and couldn’t go back there for three or four months because it was so embarrassing. I was so traumatized because I couldn’t finish it. I was like, ‘What if it happens again?’ ”

Masa said he suffered alone for much of the time he stayed away from Ramen Jiro. Eventually, though, he admitted his failure to friends. To his surprise, he learned that many of them had encountered similar problems, so they banded together to perfect their pre-Jiro conditioning.

“You can’t have a big breakfast, obviously,” Masa warned. “But an empty stomach is almost as bad. My friends tried a lot of different foods before going there. This one guy figured out that the best thing to have was fruit. And the best fruit was an Asian pear. The worst was a banana. Don’t even think about eating a banana. Anyway, we would eat a pear before going there, and then be like, ‘I think I’m ready. I think I’m ready.’ ”

 

 

 

T
hat night, when I got home from Murasaki, I typed “Ramen Jiro” into Google’s Japanese search page. I found not only the street address and a map but also a Web site that oriented Jiro newcomers. A section called “How to Jiro” was divided into advice for novices (“If you need something to drink, order the tea”) and advice for Jiro old-timers (“Don’t even think about ordering tea. Remember, this water goes into the Jiro broth and boils the Jiro noodles. It’s too precious to be wasted on tea”). Referencing a schematic diagram of the counter—with locations labeled A, B, C, etc.—the Web site deconstructed the ordering ritual that Masa had described. I learned, for instance, that when the owner was ready to present your bowl, his younger assistant, Mr. Sakai, would stand at the location labeled G (near the cash register) and repeat your order back to you. In other words, he would say
“sho”
or
“dai,”
depending on which you had chosen. This, it turned out, was a cue meaning, “Your order is ready, what toppings would you like?”

The Web site outlined acceptable responses, which were a kind of Japanese code:

According to the Web site, if you didn’t make your topping call quickly enough, Mr. Sakai would say, “Would you like garlic on that?” Hearing this line from Mr. Sakai was the ultimate Jiro disgrace, because it meant that you would be denied the pleasure of ordering extra vegetables, lard, and flavorings.

I settled on the codes for extra vegetables, extra soy sauce flavoring, and double-extra garlic, and practiced yelling them rapid-fire in my apartment.

After a few weeks, when I felt ready, I proposed a story about Casio, the Japanese electronics firm, to Josh, the editor in chief of the business magazine where I worked. I had read an article about Casio in
Nikkei Business
—Japan’s equivalent of
BusinessWeek
—that said the company was famous for shunning consumer input when designing products. The result was a history of strange gadgets that often turned out to be failures. Ill-fated Casio calculators of the 1970s and ’80s, for example, included the QL-10, which doubled as a cigarette lighter; the PG-200, which doubled as a pachinko machine; and the QD-151, which, long before anyone knew what to do with one, doubled as a mobile stock-trading device. But once every decade or so, the company’s “producer is king” approach led to huge hits, such as the first cheap portable calculator (the 1972 Casio Mini), G-Shock watches (which became popular with American skateboarders in 1991), and ultrathin Exilim digital cameras (promoted in 2002 as a fashion accessory).

I called Casio’s press relations office and set up some interviews.

In Tokyo, I rode the Chuo Line to Casio’s engineering center on the western outskirts of the city. There I interviewed Yukio Kashio, the youngest of the company’s four founding brothers. In what was a highlight of the trip, Yukio showed me how to divide 1 by 3 on the Casio 14-B, a 1959 calculator the size of a desk. Cordoned off by ropes in the lobby and constructed from telephone relay switches (transistors were not available when it was designed), the machine clicked and clacked to produce the dividend.

After the interview, I returned to Tokyo proper and rode the subway to Mita Station. Exiting the turnstiles, I followed signs to Keio University. A light rain was falling, so I stopped at a supermarket to buy an umbrella. I also swung by the fruit aisle. Ten minutes later I was standing in line—pear in belly—at Ramen Jiro.

 

 

 

T
here were around twenty men—and no women at all—in front of me on line. The rain had gotten heavier, so everyone held umbrellas. Through a window in the side of the restaurant, I could see the owner. His thin gray hair was almost gone, and he wore a dirty white apron over a dirty white undershirt.

I rehearsed saying
“Sho!”
over and over in my head.

The wait was almost exactly forty minutes, just like Masa had said, and when I finally got near the front of the line, I saw the owner up close. His apron was smeared with dried pig and chicken blood, and the impressive belly protruding from his modest frame kept him from getting too close to the soup vats he was tending.

“Nani?”
I heard him say.

I replied as decisively as possible, and with the best accent I could muster:

The other men in line began giggling. The owner giggled, too. Taking pity on me, the man behind me explained what had happened.

“Actually, he didn’t say
‘Nani.’
He was just asking if anyone could make change of a one-thousand-yen note.”

I had been so anxious about making the call that I wasn’t listening very well. Now I had made a terrible mistake. My face flushed in embarrassment. I thought that maybe I should leave. Everyone in the restaurant was giggling.

Soon the owner really did yell
“Nani?”
and I guess I felt the need to compensate for my mistake.

The giggling stopped.

I proceeded toward the counter. It was reddish orange and had two levels, one for eating, and another, above, for bowls in transit between patrons and the staff. Behind the counter stood the chef and a younger male helper, who I deduced was Mr. Sakai. Apparently willing to forgive my earlier gaffe, Mr. Sakai motioned me to the only open seat. It was on the left side of the counter.

Inside, Ramen Jiro was a cacophony of slurping. The middle-aged man next to me was sitting on his suit jacket and had removed his tie, presumably to keep it clean. Some kids, probably students from Keio, had slung white bath towels around their necks, which they occasionally used to wipe the mixture of sweat and splattered soup from their faces. A sign on the wall just above the counter said RAMEN JIRO CORPORATE PHILOSOPHY. Below the title, there were six points:

When my bowl was filled with noodles and soup, Mr. Sakai brought it over.

“Would you like garlic on that?” he asked.

Maybe I wasn’t fast enough or maybe he figured that because of my earlier mistake, I wouldn’t know the secret calls. The ultimate Jiro disgrace. I had spent all that time studying the Web site and practicing the codes in my apartment for nothing.

I pretended not to hear Mr. Sakai and yelled,
“Yasai karame nin-nin!”

Mr. Sakai looked at me and smiled as he ladled on the extra vegetables, extra soy sauce flavoring, and double-extra garlic. The Web site had said that Mr. Sakai was a nice guy and could be an important ally in difficult situations. Sure enough.

I examined the bowl in front of me. It was huge, yet looked doable. Of course, by now my judgment was unreliable. The noodles were thicker and darker than the average ramen noodle, and the broth—a combination of pork- and chicken-based stocks—was topped, as Masa had promised, with a half-inch layer of liquid lard. I picked up a pair of chopsticks in my right hand, and a soupspoon in my left.

I began slurping.

In contrast to
Shota’s Sushi
, which depicts happy sushi competition judges hovering over an ocean, when Fujimoto tastes a great bowl of ramen in
Ramen Discovery Legend
, he’s shown floating in a cloud of Nagoya chickens, dried anchovies, and the other ingredients he discerns on his tongue. And during my first five minutes of slurping at Ramen Jiro, that was how I felt. There was an explosion of pork and chicken flavor. In particular, the roast pork slices on top were richly marinated in soy sauce and nicely fatty.

Slowly, though, I began feeling full. Then my stomach started to hurt. I moaned.

“Uuuuuuuuu.”

I was not the only one moaning. Some of the people around me were also in pain. Slurping and moaning, slurping and moaning. Occasionally, I paused to catch my breath. There was no way I could go back to Masa without finishing.

 

 

 

I
t took nearly an hour, but I finished. I was shaking from the pain, and sweat dripped down my back.