Consuming Nostalgia in a Bowl of Noodle Soup at the Shin Yokohama Rāmen Museum

Date

2013-01-01

Author

Fukutomi, Satomi

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In the wake of the collapse of Japan’s economic bubble in the early 1990s, nostalgia for a specific era began to suffuse Japanese consumer culture. In 1994, the Shin Yokohama Rāmen Museum (SRM) opened to aid the development of Shin Yokohama, a relatively new business center outside of Tokyo.2 The SRM is a site that “sells” nostalgia for the Shōwa 30s (1955-1964) and the Japanese hometown, or furusato. The museum’s curator, Iwaoka Yoji, creates this nostalgia via the “national dish” of rāmen. Rāmen, a noodle soup of Chinese origin, is widely available throughout Japan as fast food for the masses. While rāmen’s distinctive features of commonplace and foreign origins are often excluded from nationalistic narratives, these characteristics are an integral part of how rāmen has become a nostalgic object and even a national symbol in the museum.

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https://asian.fiu.edu/jsr/fukutomi-consuming-nostalgia.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/111828

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Graduate School of Social Sciences, Article