Yokohama's Cup Noodles Museum

Well, it's taken over 8 eights, but this is my 300th post here! Celebrate good times!

Come on!

Please?

Minato Mirai is the harbour area of Yokohama. It’s really the feature of this wonderful city, shiny and sleek built over a few small islands with a large mall and a wonderful walkway that you can take from Sakuragicho station. It’s not in the dead centre of Yokohama, but in a district which includes the Landmark Tower and the Nihon Maru boat, which doubles as a museum. It’s also right next to Queen’s Square, a great place for restaurants and shopping. The bay looked really beautiful day, a clear day with a top temperature in the mid to high teens.

The shopping mall is called World Porters, which I found a bit of a strange name. This shopping mall moves the bags of the world to their hotel rooms? Ahh well, English is often different when used by the Japanese. And what I came today to this area to see is indeed quintessentially modern Japanese. Because in this swish precinct is the Cup Noodles Museum! That is right, you have comprehended correctly, a museum devoted to the invention of the cup noodle.

The entrance hall is seriously grand. Check out the giant cup noodle above the automatic doors!

The inside of a cup noodle cup before water is added.

I’ve already blogged, some time ago now, about the Ramen museum, and it should be understood about Japanese culture – it’s very definitely a foodie culture. Sure, cup noodles and ramen are not really haute cuisine, but nevertheless it is hard to deny that they have really left their mark on the world.

For every invention, there is a creator, and just as much as the museum I devoted to cup noodles, and instant noodles, it is also devoted to the inventor of this culinary staple – Momofuku Ando. And there you had it – I had already learnt something new, the name of the person who invented instant noodles and then thought of putting them in a cup. And I learnt that he was Japanese as well! Not only that, I learnt that they come the way they do because they are cooked in all, extracting all the moisture from them.

These are life size cutouts. They compared Einstein and Madame Curie
to the guy who invented cup noodles!

I learnt a few other things too – the way they got the noodles in the cup – by turning the cup upside down! Well I didn’t know that. Turns out that’s considered pretty amazing too! Ok, it’s all a bit surreal I admit. The museum itself is very cool, although it uses a lot of red which was a bit much in the cinema where a 13 minute animated film told the audience about the invention of the cup noodle. Then on the 3^rd floor people sat decorating and colouring in designs on the exterior of the cups. There were even cooking classes.

Then there are the cardboard cutouts of important people in history like Einstein and Edison and of course, Momofuku Ando is up there with them. Again surreal. But let’s be honest, as a seasoned traveller, museums get very ‘samey’ after a while, and as much as I like ancient pots and the like, a museum that’s a little bit quirky is not so bad.

Examples of cup noodles since 1958

So, get your instant noodle and Momofuku facts straight. 1958 – he invented instant ramen noodles. 1971, to appeal to the American market, he invented Cup Noodles. In fact, when he was 96 he invented noodles in a package that could be eaten in space. The guy loved to invent noodle-inspired products. And who amongst us HASN’T had instant noodles before? Sure, they aren’t the most healthy thing to put in your tummy, but they are cheap and convenient. Did you know the idea was conceived by Ando watching people line up for black market ramen in the years after the Second World War, at a time when much of Japan was starving? And now over 100,000 million cup noodles are consumed across the world every year?

This was the cinema. It was very red.

This is a display that I can not explain.

So if you’re in Yokohama why not come down to the Cup Noodles Museum? See the different packaging of different cup noodles over the years, and across the world. Learn about the man who made this all possible. Have your photograph taken next to a silver statue of the guy. Decorate your own cup noodle, learn how to cook cup noodles (most probably can manage that, I admit) and marvel at one of the more unique museums of the world.

Decorating your own cup noodle cup!

World Journeys. Inspiring and Informing!

May the journey never end!

Harajuku and Naked, Wet Sumo in the Park

Today I had a great day. I did three main things - I caught up with two people who went through training with Interac when I first came to live in Japan. Ravi and Kamillah are from Jamaica and  great, friendly people and after two years, it was great to catch up. They have both spent the last two years close to Tokyo teaching English, whilst I was up in Iwate in 'the sticks' as we would call in it Australia. So they have had quite a different experience living and working in Japan to me. They are also going to feature on the podcast where I will be talking to them about life in Japan and their home of Jamaica too. The podcast should be starting very soon, before April 20th I have set my date to have it all sorted.

When I was previously in Tokyo, back in August 2012 I tried to find this special spot in Harajuku where the cosplayers came out to play. It would make a really good blog post with lots of photos, I thought. But I failed to find them. Today I tried again. I headed up to Harajuku from Shibuya and went down the famous Takeshita street. The man at the tourist information tram at Shibuya advised me this was the place to go.

Except, it wasn't. I walked the length of the street, and the closest I saw to cosplayers were girls dressed up in outfits to try and attract people in to the shops. It's certainly a colourful street I should add, where you can find some of the more daring of Harajuku fashion, but no cosplayers it seemed. The shops also employed a few people from Africa - Guinea-Conarky it turned out for the couple we spoke to, to entice the customers in. Spoke to a couple of guys from Guinea-Conarky about the cosplay and they told me it was in Yoyogi Park, mainly on the weekend, principally on Sunday.

Yoyogi Park

Okay. Well we headed to Yoyogi Park, which was five minutes walk away, to see if we could find any there on a Tuesday. The park was busy, as today it was lovely and warm and sunny and despite being a Tuesday the perfect day to head out. But we saw no cosplayers sadly. However, as we were leaving we did see something perhaps almost as amazing - two men, possibly drunk, in the pond wrestling each other! They had colour-co-ordinated underwear, and some sort of cloth over their chests, so maybe it was intentional. I don't know. It certainly was a very strange thing.

With a little time left in Japan, I am looking to find the odd and different. It certainly took away from the disappointment of not finding any cosplayers - I am not done with THAT mission either.

Thursday I will be continuing my Japan Survival Guide, I'm going to look at catching trains and transport.


Please note that slowly, but surely, I will be moving over to the Wordpress site, and this one will be phased out. It's a lot of work to repost the same thing on both sites. My Wordpress site has been a work in progress but it's starting to look like what I want it to now. Here it is -
worldjourneysdiscover.wordpress.com