Ramen Heads: Humble Noodles as You've Never Imagined Them

Ramen Heads (2017)

Directed by Koki Shigeno

Gunpowder and sky, 94 minutes, PG-13

In Japanese with subtitles

★★★

If your take on ramen is a quarter for a pack for dried noodles and a salty yellowish lump alleged to be chicken flavoring, you are badly misinformed. In Japan, ramen is serious, even gourmet, food. How serious? If you wanted to slurp–and that’s the only socially accepted way of consuming–a bowl of ramen at Osamu Tomita’s 10-seat ramen restaurant in Chiba prefecture, plan to queue at 6 am just for the right to punch your name into a machine. Stand quietly and hope that you can get a table time before all the reservations are gone. Watch as the unsuccessful contemplate hari-kari. (The restaurant is only open from 11am-5 pm.)

Ramen Heads is a fascinating, though uneven, documentary that peers into Japan’s ramen cultures. Notice I used the plural. Analogous to its Italian cousin pasta, ramen can be prepared in a seemingly infinite number of ways and in settings as humble as a Tokyo marketplace stall or as upscale as fine restaurant. The number of things that end up in ramen broth stagger the imagination and a few might make you queasy. Ramen Heads puts its focus on Osamu, and there are reasons why his shop is harder to get into than Harvard. We watch as he arises well before sunrise to make his way to the wholesale food market, where he purchases flours for his noodles and ingredients for the broth. The latter includes things such a pig heads, whole chickens, and bones–and he’s pickier about bones than most people are about their partners. Broth ingredients will simmer in caldrons for three days before he uses them, and only then after being combined with liquid from two other pots, one of which is leftover broth from the day before. He measures nothing and can tell by color and smell if the broth is correct.

If this sounds as if Osamu is obsessive, he is. He has a family, but ramen is his life and has been since he was an aimless youth who first wandered into the kitchen of legendary ramen chef Kuzuo Yamagishi. Osamu became a prize-winning chef in his own right and his perfectionism extends to making employees who do something wrong to take a time out and stand outside in shame as if they were naughty five-year-olds. Aside from an odd affectation of dressing like he’s part of a motorcycle gang, Osamu seems to have no other hobbies. He even takes his family to ramen restaurants when they dine out. I doubt his kids have ever been inside a MacDonald’s. 

The film has three parts, a look into how Osamu does ramen, a quick survey of ramen cultures elsewhere in Japan, and finally preparations for Osamu’s 10^th year in business anniversary fete. The middle part of the film gives a sense of how Japanese people share Osamu’s obsession with ramen in all of its guises, but is marred by some rather cheesy animation that could have been jettisoned in favor of a deeper look at humbler shops. The 10^th anniversary bash involves a collaboration between Osamu; Shota Iita, who has the top-rated shop in a different district; and Yuki Anisha, the first ramen chef awarded a Michelin star. The three men have very different styles, but work together as teammates rather than rivals.

Director Koki Shigeno had access to Osamu for 15 months. His approach is sometimes as much anthropological than biographical. This occasionally results in a drawback that’s more glaring than the dumb animation. Individuals in the film, especially Osamu, have flat affects. It’s as if the only warmth is the steam rising from the stovetops. One hopes, for instance, that Osamu has relations with his family and friends that go beyond the business-like exterior on display in the film. Perhaps the director simply wished to focus on obsession and the quality of preparation rather than emotions.

There is arguing results, though; Osamu’s shop has been voted Japan’s best ramen restaurant for four consecutive years. Oddly enough, he managed this without ever resorting to a 25-cent pack of dried noodles and a lump of yellowish whatever.

Rob Weir