California Studies in Food and Culture, 49. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. xvii, 222 pp. (Illustrations.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-28235-3.
What are the histories and social consequences of “conceiving of a working-class food in national terms?” (12). This is among the core questions George Solt seeks to answer in his rich and convincing study of the iconic Japanese everyman’s noodle soup, The Untold History of Ramen. Solt’s attention to class and work provides a counterpoint to the frequent role of “traditional” cuisine in defining national food cultures, including recent washoku heritage campaigns in Japan. In five chapters, Solt traces ramen’s “relationship to changing notions of labor and nation” from its origins in Chinese-style eateries of the early twentieth century through its ascension to the most prominent example of Japanese “B-class gourmet” (8). He divides the book into two sections, part 1 offering a social history of prewar Shina soba pushcarts fuelling mass urban labour (chapter 1), US wheat imports and ramen on the black market in the Occupation (chapter 2), and the industrialization of food and work during Japan’s postwar era of high-speed growth (chapter 3). Part 2 covers the nostalgic rebranding of ramen in the 1980s and 1990s into a symbol of artisanal entrepreneurship alongside the decline of the forms of labour that facilitated its rise (chapter 4) and the globalization of ramen as a product of trendy, transnational youth culture in the 2000s (chapter 5).
The Untold History of Ramen makes several important contributions to the study of Japanese food history. Despite the flavour of its final chapters, Solt’s account is more interested in the socio-political history of ramen than in questions of cultural identity formation or the conviviality of the table that have preoccupied so many academic studies of food culture. Instead of relying on the common wisdom of the “secret histories of ramen” from which he draws inspiration, Solt’s keen historical sensibility allows the book to interrogate how cultural associations between ramen and the working class came into being. His discussion of the role of American wheat imports on the postwar proliferation of ramen provides a valuable supplement to Katarzyna Cwiertka’s (Modern Japanese Cuisine: Food, Power, and National Identity, London: Reaktion, 2006) concept of the “Japanese-Western-Chinese culinary tripod” in the development of modern Japanese cuisine, demonstrating how US food aid spurred the resurgence of a dish culturally associated with China.
Solt’s is a rare example of a study equally rich on the production and consumption sides, combining concern for the motivations and livelihoods of vendors with close attention to the temporalities of ramen’s social meaning and the material flows of ingredients and working bodies. The Untold History of Ramen makes a persuasive case for a quotidian dish as a legitimate subject of historical inquiry, as well as a productive lens through which to view twentieth-century Japanese social transformation.
Ramen seems caught somewhere between artisanship and industry, both in its operations and its place in the cultural imaginary. Although ramen was born in part as fuel for the agents of modern manufacturing, Solt demonstrates that it also symbolized a form of (often glorified) escape, from black market ramen stands undermining Occupation provisioning to the dream of an independent ramen shop as a postindustrial alternative to corporate structures. The self-made vendor of the prewar yatai or the apprentice-entrepreneur of the post-salaryman era implicitly hark back to a style of individualized labour and training presumed to be non-modern, despite ramen’s deep roots in the global flows and industrial development of the twentieth century.
At times, Solt’s narrative might benefit from an even more thorough examination of the specific conjunction between historical forms of labour organization and the social and nutritional functions of ramen. Labour in the 1880s, one possible origin point for ramen, looked quite different from labour in 1910, when Rai-Rai Ken was founded, which in turn differed markedly from labour in the 1930s, 1950s, 1980s, and so on. The nostalgic associations of ramen with a narrow moment in time might say more about the durable, constantly reinvented imagery of ramen consumption than it does about any organic relationship between ramen and work. In this sense, The Untold History of Ramen is not so much a history of labour patterns as it is of class representation, as the type of anonymous heavy-industrial wage labour that Solt expects readers to associate with ramen consumption was, at least in terms of sheer chronology, outside the norm in the modern history of Japan.
How far can we push Solt’s contention that ramen has become a representative national food of Japan? Even to the extent that it has been assimilated as a sign of Japanese cultural capital in the contemporary global market, ramen remains rife with subtle markers of Chineseness at home, including the katakana loanword script featured on the book’s cover. Solt’s final chapter offers a more compelling argument that ramen became Japanese when domestic and international youth culture reconfigured the terms of historical engagement in the 2000s, “where sights, sounds, and tastes stood in for texts, events, and ideas” (164). Ramen’s history and origins came to rely on what millennial consumers saw in front of them, including the invented traditions of Japanese representation slowly accumulating since the 1980s.
Finally, for a food that became so ubiquitously of the people, or at least the working class, Solt’s account could feel a bit more human. The book tends to characterize the lives and motivations of ramen purveyors and consumers rather than letting them speak for themselves, with the notable exception of the vendor hagiographies he cites from the 1980s onward. One wonders whether Solt’s decision to focus on centralized economic and political planning, especially in the second and third chapters, may have foreclosed the opportunity to explore the rich texture of everyday experience that food studies as a field is so uniquely equipped to express.
The Untold History of Ramen is a welcome addition to the fields of both modern Japanese history and food studies. It is an eminently readable and informative text that will appeal to specialists and general readers alike, as well as a valuable resource for undergraduate teaching.
Joshua Evan Schlachet
Columbia University, New York, USA
pp. 813-815