Ramen Japan

About this book

English books about ramen teach you to cook it, or chase famous shops. This book does the traveller's other job: a field guide to the styles themselves — what a bowl is, where it was born, and how it is eaten at home.

200 entries in eight parts, each in one fixed format — Origin & Home Ground, Broth & Noodles, How to Eat & Etiquette, and Places & Shop Types. Sapporo's miso family and Hakodate's clear salt bowl; Kitakata's flat morning noodles and Aomori's sardine extremes; Tokyo's hundred schools from back-fat to Jiro; Niigata's five great styles; Kyoto's rich and back-fat schools; Onomichi's fat-pearl soy, Tottori's beef bone and Tokushima's three colours; the whole tonkotsu heartland from Kurume, where the white soup was born, to Kagoshima; Okinawa's island bowls; and the new classics — tsukemen, maze soba, vegan and halal bowls — that are still being invented.

No shop is ranked and no shop's prices or hours are asserted — shops change them; styles, cities and customs do not. A glossary and an index by broth family close the book, so you can plan a journey by soup instead of by map.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.