Ramen is named after pulled noodles it has nothing to do with
Ramen takes its name from Chinese lamian, the hand-pulled noodles of the north, yet the dish has no direct link to them. It grew from Cantonese noodle soups served by Chinese immigrants in Yokohama, was long looked down on in Japan, and is now considered a national dish.
Kansui noodles reached Japan early: the diary of Kyoto's Shōkoku-ji temple records them being eaten in 1488. Historians trace ramen itself to the late 19th century, when Chinese immigrants in Yokohama, Kobe, Nagasaki and Hakodate served a range of noodle soups, popular by 1884 mainly within their own communities. A law of 1899 let foreign residents open businesses outside their settlements, and by 1900 Cantonese and Shanghainese restaurants offered noodles in a broth of salt and pork bones.
The Japanese first lumped such dishes together as Nankin soba. In 1910 Kan'ichi Ozaki, who had grown up in Yokohama around Chinese food, opened Rairaiken in Asakusa, Tokyo, which the ramen expert Hiroshi Osaki counts as the first specialised ramen shop; he hired twelve Cantonese cooks from Yokohama's Chinatown and called the dish shina soba. After the Second World War the word shina became recognised as a slur bound up with imperialism and gave way to chūka.
Ramen as a word first appeared in print in Seiichi Yoshida's 1928 cookbook, though there it meant true hand-pulled noodles. The likeliest explanation for its later use is that Japanese settlers returning from northern China after 1945 applied it to the southern-style soups because they looked similar. Postwar hunger helped the dish spread: after the worst rice harvest in 42 years in December 1945, American occupiers flooded Japan with cheap wheat flour.
Momofuku Ando's Nissin Chikin Ramen, released in 1958, carried the name nationwide, and instant ramen went abroad in 1971. Regional styles multiplied, from Sapporo's rich miso broth to the thick, flat noodles of Kitakata, where a traveller from Zhejiang named Fan Qinxing opened a shop in 1925 in homage to Rairaiken. The original Rairaiken closed in 1976, but in 2026 Ozaki's great-great-grandson reopened it in Asakusa.
Source: Ramen
