一竜 ichiryu: before the boom
Four years ago, I lost my best friend. His name was Aaron, and he had been living in southern Japan, much as I’d once done. In fact, we had initially moved to Kyushu at approximately the same time and point in our lives, landing English teaching jobs in the Japanese public school system within months of each other. We’d been roommates in university, and as freshly minted graduates, we moved to a foreign country because it had seemed a sensible procrastinator’s compromise to actually hunkering down and giving a shit in the “real” working world.
But whereas I served out my teaching contract and eventually returned to the States, Aaron had stayed on in Japan. From those humble beginnings with the JET program, he managed to pay off his student loans, build a career amidst the rice fields, and find himself a place to call home, 6,000 miles from home. And so, in the intervening years, whenever I’d return to visit my old stomping grounds, I’d drop in on my buddy for a few days or a few weeks, crashing on his couch or more accurately, sleeping in his kotatsu, the Japanese analog to the coffee table, only families eat dinner around it and you can spend your whole life sitting under it. There’s really no need to ask.
Aaron was the sort of guy who could mine comic gold from a liferaft were we lost at sea, a skinny, pop culture-infused Costello to my straight-faced Abbot, a hit with the girls if only he didn’t sell himself short. He was someone for whom a 2LDK, tatami-floored apartment was essentially a storage unit for an infuriatingly massive collection of movies, giant robots, Japanese Star Wars bottle caps and Famicom games, the crown jewels of which happened to be the impossible-to-find, out-of-print Nippon edition of Puzzle Bobble and the entire The Prisoner televison series on VHS tape. Aaron was the sort of person who would often remark that, should the movie of his life ever be made, he’d like to be played by “that guy that’s the perfect sidekick, never the lead.” It was only later that I figured out he was referring to Jeremy Piven, more specifically, to the Entourage star’s oeuvre from the late eighties and early nineties, ostensibly from Say Anything to PCU.
Back in 2005, rameniac was little more than a collision of long-firing impulses in the ganglia of my grey matter. One thing however, was certain. Aaron would be the site’s “Japan correspondent,” and so a good portion of my fateful trip to Kyushu that year — the last time I would see him — was spent gathering data. Of course by data I simply mean goofing off and ogling girls and eating noodles, lots of noodles, not necessarily in that order.
Aaron, after all, was at least as much a rameniac as I am, and long before the first line of code was ever written for this website, he’d made a habit of sending me torturous snapshots of the bowls he’d consumed, little 500 kilobyte transpacific taunts sent via email by way of a quaintly retro (at least by present standards) Japanese keitai mobile phone.
It was late March, still winter in southern Japan, and with a day or two to go before I was to return to Tokyo, we had made the nearly hour-long trek from Aaron’s situation in the suburbs of Kitakyushu and headed to Fukuoka city for one final bowl of noodles, authentic Hakata ramen. It was the last proper meal I would share with him; in under two weeks, he would be gone.
The yatai that line the Nakasu river in the shadow of Canal City are world famous; at night, they come alive like a glowing shantytown of drunken salarymen, acrid pork bones, and bubbling gyu suji beef stew, a local specialty. It was here that I had first begun to foment the idea for a ramen-themed website, before the word “blog” had ever entered the popular lexicon and long before everyone and their mother started documenting every candlelit amuse bouche with a 10-megapixel digital camera.
Standing there on the Watanabe-dori, with a light snow falling and surrounded on all sides by dozens of options for downright amazing food, we spotted one food cart with a disproportionately long line of people — far more than at of the other yatai — a crowd stacked least thirty deep and queueing for seats while shivering in the biting air.
“Ichi... ichi... What’s the name of this place? One something,” I mused.
“Hmm,” Aaron paused, pursing his lips and stroking his stubble. He pointed authoritatively at nothing in particular. “I think that’s the character for turtle. One turtle.”
“Ichikame?” I wondered.
We shrugged.
He turned to the Japanese couple at the very end of the line. “Is this one really the best?” he asked in confident if not quite pitch perfect Japanese.
“I don’t know!” The woman laughed. “We just got in line because everyone else did too!”
It was freezing that night. “Dood, should we wait?” I blurted out.
“Do we really have a choice?” Aaron responded, grinning slyly.
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