The city of Yokohoma, just south of Tokyo, has a special museum dedicated to warm, brothy ramen (or “raumen” as they spell it.)

It’s a long way from the dried noodles that you shove into a microwave — check out the real stuff at the unique Shin-Yokohama Raumen Museum. 

Once you pay a small fee to enter, you are transported back to late-1950s era shitamachi Tokyo, right down to the advertising signs, street performers, a little toy shop and eight different actual ramen restaurants, each serving different styles of the iconic noodle bowl, at very reasonable prices (including perhaps a Kirin or Sapphoro beer to accompany your feast.)

In support of my time living in Sasebo, on Kyushu, I tried out the Hakata and Kumamoto restaurants; they specialize in Kyushu-style ramen, with lots of pork.

Some of the museum street performers tell Japanese adventure tales to children using special painted story-boards.

Watch their technique of building up to an exciting point in the story and then quickly showing a new picture: this is one of the cultural foundations of today’s anime and manga styles.

The gift shop has noodle-related knick-knacks including Naruto, who is a very popular manga character with his own action show on American TV.

His name comes from the traditional small decorative egg item with a swirl that is placed on top of bowls of ramen.

HOW TO GET THERE: Take the subway from Tokyo to the Sakuragi-cho subway station and walk out the Minato Mirai exit.

There is a tourist booth just outside the exit where you can get maps and directions to all of the attractions in Yokohama.

The Ramen Museum is a few minute’s walk from Exit 8 of the Shinyokohama subway station on the Yokohama City subway line.

Here’s a fun video of a Backstreet Boys-ish pop group called DBSK who visit the museum (hence the flashy intro but just wait; the museum comes on in a minute or so.)  There are English subtitles but they’re small and you have to read quickly.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 9:51 am and is filed under Asia travel, Sheila projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.