The Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ve probably realized that Japanese people love museums. I’m fairly sure that there are more interesting, strange and downright baffling museums per capita in the Tokyo area than there are anywhere else in the world. And we all know how beloved ramen, Japan’s supposed “national dish” (despite its Chinese origins) is. So it only makes sense that Shin Yokohama’s “Raumen Museum” is one of the nicest, strangest and most delicious museums around.

First ramen in space!

The anatomy of a giant cup of instant ramen.

The ramen museum has a special exhibition space towards the back of the first floor that houses new exhibitions on a rotating basis. I know that one of the previous shows here was an exhibition of instant ramen packaging. Well, the current exhibit is far more interesting than that, it’s the "My Cupnoodle Factory," an interactive exhibit that invites you to design your own cup of instant ramen! Step one: buy an empty cup from this machine for ￥300.

After decorating and customizing your cup, you bring it over to the assembly line where you fill it up with your choice of soup mix, noodles, meat and vegetables.

Finally, your ramen is freeze dried and placed inside a plastic bubble for easy transportation. All that’s left is to take it home and eat it up like a hungry college student.

The basement of the museum consists of an elaborate, two-floor reproduction of 1950s Tokyo, right about the time that ramen really started gaining popularity.

Various actors walk around this space, adding to the immersive feel. Here, we see some 1950s police officers organizing a jan ken pon (rock, paper, scissors) tournament in the street, because that’s what cops did in Tokyo in the 1950s, I guess?

While the Tokyo recreation was interesting in and of itself, the real attraction here was the eight ramen shops that it housed. In addition to shops selling old school toys, snacks and cigarettes there were ramenya representing eight of the more famous regional styles of ramen in the country. I decided to show some Tohoku pride by sampling the karamiso ramen from famous ramen shop “Ryu Shanghai” in Akayu, Yamagata Prefecture. The red lump in the center of the bowl is the “karamiso topping,” a special blend of garlic, soy bean paste and spicy pepper. You can mix in as much or as little of it as you like, in order to alter the taste of the soup. I got a bit cocky and mixed in the whole thing, which led to a painfully spicy (yet still delicious) bowl of ramen.