Common flavors are soy sauce and miso, with typical toppings including sliced pork (chāshū), nori (dried seaweed), menma (bamboo shoots), and scallions.

[2][3] The word ramen (拉麺) first appeared in Japan in Seiichi Yoshida's How to Prepare Delicious and Economical Chinese Dishes (1928).

[4] In the book, Yoshida describes how to make ramen using flour and kansui, kneading it by hand, and stretching it with an illustration.

[5] Early ramen or ramen-like dishes went by different names, such as Nankin soba (南京そば, lit.

The official diary of Shōkoku-ji Temple in Kyoto, Inryōken Nichiroku (蔭涼軒日録), mentions eating jīngdàimiàn (経帯麪), noodles with kansui, in 1488.

However, the noodles Mitsukuni ate were a mixture of starch made from lotus root and wheat flour, which is different from chūkamen with kansui.

[23] According to historians, the more plausible theory is that ramen was introduced to Japan in the late 19th[11][24] or early 20th centuries by Chinese immigrants living in Yokohama Chinatown.

[16][17] By 1900, restaurants serving Chinese cuisine from Guangzhou and Shanghai offered a simple dish of noodles, a few toppings, and a broth flavored with salt and pork bones.

Many Chinese living in Japan also pulled portable food stalls, selling ramen and gyōza dumplings to workers.

By the mid-1900s, these stalls used a type of a musical horn called a charumera (チャルメラ, from the Portuguese charamela) to advertise their presence, a practice some vendors still retain via a loudspeaker and a looped recording.

[11] The store also served standard Chinese fare like wontons and shumai, and is sometimes regarded as the origin of Japanese-Chinese fusion dishes like chūkadon and tenshindon.

In 1933, Fu Xinglei (傅興雷), one of the twelve original chefs, opened a second Rairaiken in Yūtenji, Meguro Ward, Tokyo.

[29] In 2020, Ozaki's grandson and great-great-grandson re-opened the original Rairaiken as a store inside Shin-Yokohama Rāmen Museum.

[11] Although the Americans maintained Japan's wartime ban on outdoor food vending,[11] flour was secretly diverted from commercial mills into the black markets,[11] where nearly 90 percent of stalls were under the control of gangsters related to the yakuza who extorted vendors for protection money.

[11] In the same period, millions of Japanese troops returned from China and continental East Asia from their posts in the Second Sino-Japanese War.

[11] By 1950 wheat flour exchange controls were removed and restrictions on food vending loosened, which further boosted the number of ramen vendors: private companies even rented out yatai starter kits consisting of noodles, toppings, bowls, and chopsticks.

At the same time, local varieties of ramen were hitting the national market and could even be ordered by their regional names.

[34] Tsuta, a ramen restaurant in Tokyo's Sugamo district, received a Michelin star in December 2015.

Most chūkamen are made from four basic ingredients: wheat flour, salt, water, and kansui [ja], derived from the Chinese jiǎnshuǐ (鹼水), a type of alkaline mineral water containing sodium carbonate and usually potassium carbonate, as well as sometimes a small amount of phosphoric acid.

Automatic ramen-making machines imitating manual production methods have been available since the mid-20th century produced by such Japanese manufacturers as Yamato MFG.

Most tonkotsu ramen restaurants offer a system known as kae-dama (替え玉), where customers who have finished their noodles can request a "refill" (for a few hundred yen more) to be put into their remaining soup.

They do not include noodle dishes considered traditionally Japanese, such as soba or udon, which are almost never served in the same establishments as ramen.

As ramen-ya restaurants offer mainly ramen dishes, they tend to lack variety in the menu.

Ramen restaurants are typically narrow and seat customers closely, making social distancing difficult.

In Japan, these dishes are not traditionally served with ramen, but gyoza, kara-age, and others from Japanese Chinese cuisine.

Outside of Asia, particularly in areas with a large demand for Asian cuisine, there are restaurants specializing in Japanese-style foods such as ramen noodles.

While some research has claimed that consuming instant ramen two or more times a week increases the likelihood of developing heart disease and other conditions, including diabetes and stroke, especially in women, those claims have not been reproduced and no study has isolated instant ramen consumption as an aggravating factor.

It is produced by a popular local ramen restaurant in flavors such as tonkotsu and curry, and contains noodles, soup, menma, and pork.