A friend and former colleague is back in Japan and because I was at work on a Saturday (long story) he came back to the school and I showed him all the new toys that had arrived since he’d left. We then went for a beer and a bowl of ramen soup.

One of my relatives once scoffed at the idea of an eight dollar bowl of soup. I told her she was missing out. She remained skeptical even when I pointed out it was only eight dollars because of the exchange rate.

Part of the problem is that ramen soup, in the USA at least, is sustenance for graduate students. In 1995, while I was at Ole MIss, I vaguely remember the price being a dollar for a pack of five. A quick check of some websites tells me that’s what the price is now. This means, oddly, that ramen is one of the few foods to go down in price relative to inflation. (The inflation adjusted price should have been $1.54 for a pack of five.)

This notion of cheap graduate student food is also true in Japan, the difference is it’s also food for workers with short lunch breaks.

The other difference is that if you spend a little more, you get well made ramen, even at a national chain. My friend and I went to a chain that is quite typical of ramen chains. You buy tickets for what you want from a vending machine near the door and then one of the staff fetch the tickets and start preparing your order. This way employees never touch the money and the store has a good sense of what sells and what doesn’t.

A lot of this is designed to get you in feed you and then usher you out as quickly as possible. My friend and I, however, did not do that as the other good thing about most ramen restaurant chains is they sell beer from the moment they open until they close.

We bought ramen, gyoza and a beer and then got confused when we actually had the choice of bottle for draft (we chose draft). We both spiced up the ramen with garlic greens mixed with red pepper sauce and destroyed the ramen, as people are supposed to, as quickly as possible. We then sat around catching up for a couple hours hogging the only real table in the restaurant.

Oddly, we only had one beer each, at least until we visited a grocery store and my friend bought a canned whiskey drink and walked back to the station with me.