The Ramen King and I

by Andy Raskin

  I never fell asleep that night.

  I had long wondered what Ando meant when, explaining his decision to leave Taiwan, he wrote “something was cutting into my heart.” I had wondered why he spoke of desires “one must learn to control,” and why I was always reading messages between the lines when he talked about ramen.

  Now I had some idea.

  After taking my last shower at the Hotel Excellent, I put on my underwear. On a scale of one to ten, I rated my speed one million seven hundred seventy-one thousand five hundred sixty-one.

  I checked out at five thirty in the morning and walked back to Ebisu Station, where I waited for the Yamanote Line train—the one that circles Tokyo proper. On the platform, a billboard advertisement for a brand of intimate apparel said LINGERIE IS LOVE JEWELRY. During the train ride, I noticed advertisements for iced coffee drinks, iced tea drinks, and adult education programs. A new service allowed consumers to pay bills using their cell phones. A men’s magazine called Straight,—the trailing comma was part of the name—touted its latest cover story, “How to Have Fun with Your Wife and Family.”

  I got off at Tokyo Station, where I had to wait forty-five minutes for the bullet train. I was tempted by a “morning curry” set in the food court but chose instead to eat breakfast at the soba shop next door. I ordered a bowl of buckwheat noodles topped with shungiku tempura, a batter-fried leafy green. My Japan Rail Pass prohibited me from riding the express Nozomi (“desire”) bullet trains, so I got a ticket for a Hikari (“light”) bullet train to Osaka. The ride would take three hours. Before boarding, I stood in front of a bento-box lunch stand on the platform and considered my options. There was a “Tokyo bento,” a “salmon bento,” a “Japanese Flag bento,” a “beef-over-rice bento,” and a “veggie bento,” plus many more. The fanciest one cost thirty dollars. Bewildered by the choices, I dragged myself away from the bento stand only to be drawn in by an array of unfamiliar Kit Kat flavors at a newspaper kiosk. There was a strawberry Kit Kat, a green tea Kit Kat, a custard Kit Kat, a mandarin orange Kit Kat, and an Exotic Tokyo Kit Kat (an assortment sold in a package designed by renowned pastry chef Yasumasa Takagi to evoke Tokyo nightlife). On the wrappers, Nestlé’s Japanese subsidiary was promoting the bars as good-luck charms for college entrance exams, playing up how the candy’s name sounds like “Kitto katsu!” (“You’ll surely win!”). I bought a cherry Kit Kat and a Kit Kat flavored with sweet adzuki beans, and both were amazingly great.

  I should have bought the salmon bento at Tokyo station because on the bullet train, I ordered a fried oyster bento from a girl speaking in a high-pitched voice, and the oysters were cold and soggy. As always, the day’s news headlines scrolled across the display at the end of the car. “Toyota Market Cap Tops 39 Trillion Yen.” “Red Sox Attendance Up Due to Matsuzaka.” “Cabbies to Get Coached on Courtesy.”

  Arriving at New Osaka Station, I rode the escalator down to the underground mall, where I found a room of coin-operated lockers. I retrieved a printout of directions to Kyocera Dome Osaka from my suitcase, shoving it into my backpack. Then I squeezed my suitcase into a locker so I wouldn’t have to drag it to the stadium. I was early, so for old times’ sake I walked around searching for the air-conditioning vent I had stood under on my previous visit. I was disappointed not to find it, but it was late February, so New Osaka Station was comfortably cool.

  The directions said to take the Kanjo (“loop”) Line to Taisho Station, which was a seven-minute walk from the stadium. I bought a ticket and ascended the escalator to the platform. I didn’t notice right away that everyone around me was dressed in black. I didn’t notice it until the train pulled up and the doors opened, and everyone inside the train was wearing black, too. The men wore black suits and black ties, the women black dresses. Everyone wore black shoes.

  My outfit: jeans, blue sweater, brown suede coat, brown work boots. A green Timbuk2 backpack hung from my shoulders.

  YOU ARE SUCH AN IDIOT.

  I should not have assumed that just because the funeral was being held in a baseball stadium it would be a casual affair.

  On the train, I struck up a conversation with a middle-aged man from Yamaguchi Prefecture. He worked for a Nissin supplier, and he said that most of the funeral attendees would likely be businesspeople whose companies had ties to Nissin. I realized that, aside from a few movies with scenes of Japanese funerals (most notably Juzo Itami’s The Funeral), I had never witnessed one, and knew very little about them. “The body was already cremated, right?” I asked the man from Yamaguchi. He said that it probably had been, and that the family had most likely conducted a private ceremony shortly after Ando’s passing. That must have been the one that Hirotoshi attended with his sons.

  When the train arrived at Taisho Station, black outfits poured from the car doors, through the turnstiles, and into a river of black clothing that was already flowing down the street. The black current carried me first along a four-lane road, then across the street and over Iwamatsu Bridge. I let myself be swept along like a piece of inappropriately dressed driftwood. At every intersection, men wearing NISSIN FOOD PRODUCTS armbands held signs displaying large arrows that merged my black flow with other black flows. After exactly seven minutes, I was deposited into a pool of black clothing that had formed outside the massive silver blob that was Kyocera Dome Osaka. Signs above me advertised Orix Buffaloes home games.

  Just then, a gray-haired man to my left reached into the pocket of his black suit jacket and pulled out a bright white envelope.

  I looked around. Lots of people were opening bright white envelopes.

  “Excuse me,” I said to the gray-haired man. “What’s inside the envelope?”

  Unsealing it, he removed a bright white card. “It’s the invitation.”

  Two lines had formed in front of Kyocera Dome Osaka’s entrance number six, so I positioned myself at the end of one of them. It took fifteen minutes to get close enough to see that several young women—sporting NISSIN FOOD PRODUCTS armbands—were handing each black-clad invitee a funeral program and a white shopping bag. They were also collecting the invitation cards. When I reached the front of the line, the woman who greeted me seemed wary. Her caution was understandable. I was the only person within a one-kilometer radius not dressed in formal funeral attire.

  “May I see your invitation card?” she asked.

  “I don’t have an invitation card.”

  “Mmm.”

  I thought that maybe I could guilt her into letting me through.

  “I came all the way from America to pay my respects.”

  “Just a moment.”

  The woman disappeared into the tunnel behind entrance number six. She was gone more than a minute. When she came back, she was sucking air through her teeth.

  “I’m sorry, but it will be difficult for you to enter this gate without an invitation.”

  I should have checked if I needed an invitation before I traveled halfway around the world to attend a funeral. I should have inquired about proper attire. I should not have wasted so much time and money.

  “Can I at least take a program?”

  “Of course,” she said, smiling.

  She handed me an English version. It had been printed on a single sheet of heavy white paper and folded in thirds. The front cover said, “Company-Sponsored Funeral Service for Dr. Momofuku Ando, Founder.” The “Dr.” was a reference, no doubt, to the honorary Ph.D. from Ritsumeikan University. The inside of the program listed the order of events:

  1. Opening Remarks

  2. Reading of Sutras

  3. Memorial Address

  4. Reading of Condolence Telegrams

  5. Address of Thanks

  —Mr. Yasuhiro Nakasone, Funeral Committee Chairman

  —Mr. Koki Ando, Chief Mourner

  6. Thurification

  7. Closing Remarks

  I had never heard the word thurification.

  The back of the program carried excerpts from the New York Times arti
cle, the one by Lawrence Downes. “The title of the article itself was extraordinary,” the program stated. “It was called ‘Appreciations: Mr. Noodle.’ ” The Nissin public relations department was clearly citing the Times article as proof of Ando’s global importance.

  I stood near entrance number six for some time unsure what to do.

  O Momofuku. Please show me how to live so that I may better do your will.

  I had begun walking against the black current back to Taisho Station when, passing entrance number five, I saw a sign.

  The sign said PRESS ENTRANCE.

  Only two times in my life have I pretended not to speak Japanese. The first was during spring break at International Christian University, when the ticket collector on the bullet train asked for my special express ticket. To ride the bullet train you need a regular ticket and a special express ticket, but I had forgotten to purchase the latter. The conductor decided that finding the English words to make me pay would have been more difficult than forgetting about it, so he forgot about it.

  The second time was at entrance number five to Kyocera Dome Osaka. Still, I didn’t really have a plan.

  “Are you on our registered press list?” the woman at the gate asked.

  “I’m a writer,” I said in English.

  She made a small rectangle with her hands, miming that she wanted to see my business card.

  “I don’t have any cards,” I said, slapping the pockets of my jeans.

  The woman had no choice but to switch to English.

  “Newspaper name?”

  I didn’t work for a newspaper. But then I remembered the story I had written about “YOU SHOULD BE ABLE TO FIND GREAT PARKING SPOTS, THE WAY YOUR FATHER ALWAYS DOES.” It had been published in The New York Times the day I left San Francisco. I had purchased the newspaper just before boarding my flight, and it was still in my backpack.

  “New York Times!” the woman at entrance number five said when I showed her the article.

  “Yes,” I said, pointing to my byline. I also showed her my California driver’s license to prove it was me.

  “You wrote . . . ‘Appreciations: Mr. Noodle?’ ”

  Luckily, the funeral program didn’t print Downes’s name, just the excerpts from his story.

  “I’m not on staff at the Times,” I said. “I just sold this piece to them as a freelancer. I’m really hoping to write more for them. It is so hard to sell them stories, though. And the pay isn’t the greatest, but I guess the exposure makes it worth it—”

  The woman was so excited to meet the man she believed to be the author of “Appreciations: Mr. Noodle” that she handed me a program and one of the white shopping bags. She also wrote out an official name tag.

  The name tag read ANDY RASKIN, NEW YORK TIMES.

  “Hurry up,” she said, waving me inside the stadium. “The ceremony is about to begin.”

  I walked past the woman at entrance number five and entered a long, dark tunnel. When I came out the other end, I could barely see anything in front of me. That was because nearly all the lights in the domed stadium had been turned off. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, and when they did, the difficult part was believing them.

  The inside of Kyocera Dome Osaka had been designed to look like outer space.

  Huge video screens hanging from the upper deck displayed images of slowly rotating galaxies, and thousands of bluish-white LEDs twinkled in the bleachers. A black tarp covered the playing field. Futuristic synthesized music blared from giant speakers near the foul poles. Occasionally, the galaxies would fade from the screens, only to be replaced by satellite video of Earth or the moon. It felt like I had walked onto the set of Star Wars.

  Of course, the decor was not a tribute to Star Wars, and I shook my head as I figured it out. The funeral was going to be one final homage to Ando’s special relationship with Halley’s Comet.

  Thousands of people were already seated in folding chairs that filled the playing field. (The official attendance was nearly seven thousand.) The audience faced out toward the home run wall, where a magnificent stage had been constructed. Long and white, the stage was fringed on both sides by white orchids and rows of Buddhist monks sitting seiza style. The monks sported shaved heads and formal robes—some yellow, some purple. Above them, another large video screen displayed a head shot of Ando wearing a turquoise suit, a blue diamond-patterned tie, and clear, wire-rimmed glasses. I judged that the photo had been taken when Ando was in his eighties. He seemed happy.

  I had emerged from the tunnel in foul territory, somewhere in the vicinity of third base. In front of me, a long line of armbanded Nissin employees wielding flashlights greeted guests and helped them find their way in the dark. A female Nissin employee bowed in front of me, and I followed her to an empty seat in shallow center field.

  “Would you like a blanket?” she asked.

  With the synthesized music and the spinning galaxies and the offer of a blanket, I felt as if I had boarded a spaceship in which the Nissin staff members were flight attendants and we were bound for another galaxy. It was chilly.

  “I would love a blanket.”

  Wrapping my legs in the thin blue wool, I squinted to examine the contents of the white shopping bag in the dark. There were three items:

  • A five-serving package of Chikin Ramen

  • An ECO Cup—Nissin’s new, environmentally friendly version of Cup Noodles (consisting of a reusable plastic cup and one separately sold noodle-and-topping insert)

  • A book titled Thus Spake Momofuku

  The book was a 235-page collection of Ando’s famous sayings, and it had been published the day before the ceremony. (The Japanese title employed an archaic construction meant to evoke Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra.) Thumbing through, I recognized many of the sayings from Ando’s autobiographies. Some, however, were unfamiliar:

  “Inside every human being there are two minds. One wants to do good things. The other wants to do what it wants to do.”

  “Flavors taste best to those who appreciate them.”

  “Viewed from outer space, the Earth is nothing more than a limited, tiny sphere. Unlimited desires in a limited world give rise to all sorts of contradictions.”

  Guests were still filing in when the deep voice of a male announcer boomed through the sound system:

  “He was the inventor of instant ramen. It was easy to eat, and economical. He also invented Cup Noodles. He came from outer space, and now we send him back to outer space. That is our theme today.”

  The spinning galaxies faded out again, and a video tribute to Ando filled the monitors. It began with images of the first Chikin Ramen package, above which was printed another of Ando’s famous sayings: “In life, there is no such thing as too late!” A folksy pop song by the Japanese band Mr. Children played while the video cut quickly between scenes from Ando’s life: the first Nissin assembly lines; Ando standing next to the Golden Gate Bridge (during his legendary trip to America in 1966); a container of Cup Noodles (and Ando saying, “Let’s put it in a cup so they can eat it with a fork!”). Over a montage in which people of all colors and sizes were enjoying instant ramen, a narrator declared, “It was an invention that changed the world!” Here was Ando fishing with Masako during the days when he ran the salt operation in Izumi-Otsu; Ando receiving the honorary doctorate from Ritsumeikan University; his noodle-study trips throughout Asia; astronaut Soichi Noguchi eating Space Ram aboard the space shuttle; Ando sinking a particularly difficult putt in 1987. “He was a man who lived life on a planetary scale,” the narrator said. The video ended with computer-generated images of Halley’s Comet.

  Next, a procession of more monks emerged, slowly and in single file, from an area near the bull pen. As they made their way up to the stage via a long white ramp, their faces filled the stadium displays. The only thing behind them was the dark, star-filled bleacher section, so on the monitors the monks appeared to be ascending a path to heaven. Once all the
bull pen monks had joined the monks who were already onstage, the head monk—distinguished by robes more elaborate than those of his colleagues—began waving what looked like a white-haired doll. The stadium cameras zoomed in, and I saw that it was not a doll but a ceremonial wand from which hair dangled at one end. The head monk waved the hairy wand in circles over his head, and then in circles to his left and to his right.

  “Please assume the gassho pose,” the announcer said.

  Everyone in the stadium stood up and brought their hands together. Meanwhile, the monks chanted a single sound.

  “Oooooooh...”

  Absolute silence.

  The monks beat drums now, which was the cue for the audience to sit back down. One monk played what sounded like a shakuhachi, the traditional Japanese flute. There was more chanting, but this time it came from only the head monk. His back to the audience, he bobbed back and forth, still seated seiza-style in front of the large photo of Ando’s face. The first words of his chant were the mantra said to guarantee all who utter it automatic entrance to the Land of Happiness.