Tokyo: Ramen Museum (Day 1)

I don't know how many of you know this, but I'm kind of a fan of instant ramen. When I was about 15 years old*, I heard about a mystical place filled with ramen, ramen history, and ramen-related stuff. Now, if you can think of a more delicious place, I welcome you to try - a cheesecake or licorice factory might give it a run for its money - but it's a great combination of educational and culinary goodness.

*I previously said that I'd been wanting to go for ten years, but when I went to write this post I thought about it a little more and I think it's closer to six or seven. Please excuse my zeal.

For a slightly heartier description, you might check out Wikipedia's article or this random website. If you can read Japanese, you might try the official website.

I'm not certain why I took these pictures, but if it helps, here's an image of the last intersection on the way to the museum form Shin-Yokohama station. It's at the far right of this picture, and the road that goes off in that direction runs North-South.

Finding it is pretty easy, as you can follow a path marked by convenience stores at each corner, which makes it really easy to follow a map to it. I mean, I found the place on my own - without getting lost one or more times - so I'm pretty certain anybody can. At right, you can see what the entrance looks like, and you can also see that they, for some reason entirely beyond me, spell ramen with a U. The "Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum".
No idea.

Inside, they have a gift shop, a timeline, a little fake ramen shop, drawers, examples of various kinds of ramen, and... the basement.

The gift shop takes up about half of the ground floor. It's got some neat stuff, and quite a variety, from musical instruments to cell phone charms to high-quality (presumably?) ramen and ingredients. It's pretty decent as gift shops go. With stuff that's not too painfully priced, you could say it's a bit of a rarity here.

The timeline was pretty cool, but since it was all in Japanese and I'm really not that much of a history person, I kind of stared at it for a while and tried to make noises that sounded like I was getting something from it. The basic gist of it was that the whole thing started around the middle of the 1800s and there are still innovations taking place in contemporary times. It seemed well-done, and someone with better reading skills than me would've probably liked it.

The fake ramen shop was pretty neat. It's a red-themed replica of a ramen shop - a bar, basically - but you can go on the other side of the counter and play around with some of the utensils and stuff. In addition, there was information on kinds of noodles and ingredients and their history here. I'm not sure why, but I never took a picture of the whole area, and only got a bunch of the details, like this one at left: examples of varous kinds of noodles.
In addition to this display, there was a display in another area that had various kinds of instant ramen from the past hundred years or so. You will see an Arnold Shwarzeneger one among some of the more strange ones - it's in the lower-right.

The drawers area was kind of like a morgue for ramen shops. It had memorabilia from probably two hundred ramen shops from around the country. They were numbered, though I'm not sure why. I opened up drawers three and four and took the picture at right.
"Ooo, bowls and a T-shirt", right?
This picture is a good example of when one might use a polarizer. I think I might have, actually. The flourescent lights tend to put quite a lot of glare on shiny stuff, and the glass covers for the drawers hardly show up in this picture.

Then there's the basement.

The basement is a two-level replica of some city 1940s Japan. It looks kind of like someone was filming a Western movie, and then accidentally imported a bunch of stuff from the 1940s and just kind of... blended them. I'm not saying it's not fairly authentic, merely that it was kind of weird.

I refuse to categorically go through what was in the basement on the basis that I don't want to spend the next week writing this one post, but some of the highlights follow.

I tried mizu-ame ("water sugar-candy" is about the best I can do with this one), which is basically runny, flavorless taffy. I guess this was Japanese kids' first experience with pure sugar, because it is just like eating caro syrup. Yum.

I had a bowl of ramen. At $10, I had pretty high expectations, but I was stupid and got a spicy ramen, and the Japanese don't really know how to make spicy food that has flavor without involving curry. Or something. Anyway, it was fairly average ramen, especially compared to the place I had gone to the previous night with Shimpei.
It was prettier when they sent it out to me, but I didn't think to take a picture until I had poked at it a little.

Lastly, I got some ice cream and headed back out. The ice cream was pretty decent and was really good after eating a hot bowl of spicy ramen. Cooler was the little stand they brought it out on. In? I don't know.

On the way out, I asked a random Japanese girl to go pose for me, and after a minute or two of giggling, she did. This picture really doesn't do her justice, but I'm not sure who would look good in that frame.