Shōyu ramen: seasoning and stock

Shōyu ramen uses a soy-sauce-based tare to season its soup. Tare is a concentrated seasoning mixture combined with stock; it may include the sauce used to simmer pork or seafood extracts. Chicken bones, pork bones and dried fish describe stock ingredients. The name shōyu does not choose just one of them.

A common method puts tare in the bowl before hot stock, followed by cooked noodles and toppings. Chicken fat or lard can add aroma and body, with different practices among shops. Tonkotsu shōyu is therefore a coherent description: pork bones name the stock, while soy sauce names the seasoning.

Stock extracts flavour from ingredients into water. A method described by flavour specialist Takasago cooks animal ingredients for longer, extracts a seafood stock separately over a shorter period, then combines the liquids. Shorter seafood extraction limits unwanted astringency and loss of aroma. Each stock is extracted before blending and seasoning with soy tare; the ingredients need not share one prolonged cooking process.

Shōyu ramen can use straight or wavy noodles of different widths and water contents. Pork, menma and chopped spring onion are common toppings, with seaweed or eggs among the additions. Menma is processed and seasoned bamboo shoot. In Japanese ramen, chāshū often means simmered seasoned pork, rather than necessarily roast pork.

Noodle maturation takes place before boiling. Describing its own products, Nishiyama Seimen explains that newly made noodles contain unevenly distributed water and trapped air. During resting, moisture becomes more uniform and air escapes, changing the gloss and firm texture of the cooked noodle. Choosing noodles therefore involves their manufacturing and resting state as well as their width. The required time varies by product.

Kitakata’s characteristic noodles are relatively thick, flat and wavy, made with a higher proportion of water and rested before use. Common clear soy-seasoned soups use ingredients including pork bones, chicken bones and dried sardines.

Asahikawa is associated with soy seasoning, a double stock of pork bones and seafood, lower-water wavy noodles and a surface layer of lard.

Wakayama chūka soba commonly combines pork-bone stock with soy sauce, with styles leaning more towards one or the other. Some shops cook pork bones directly with soy sauce; others season a long-cooked bone stock.

Asakusa Rairaiken opened in 1910 and used soy tare in its shina soba, becoming a representative early Tokyo shop. Chinese noodle dishes had earlier restaurant histories after Japan’s ports opened. The year dates this shop’s opening; it need not be treated as the birthday of every soy-seasoned noodle soup.

The Japan Ramen Fan Club’s history describes Kan’ichi Ozaki inviting Cantonese cooks from Yokohama’s Chinatown to Rairaiken in Asakusa. Shūmai, wontons and noodle soup formed an accessible menu for customers dining alone, and soy tare seasoned the noodles. Change involved both the cooks’ dishes and a shop format that offered them as everyday meals.

In the 1920s, Takeya Shokudō began operating in Sapporo and Genraiken in Kitakata. Postwar carts and shops expanded while soups and noodles developed in different directions. Television and other coverage brought regional styles wider attention in the 1980s. Soy seasoning remained a basis for many of those variations.

Kitakata’s ramen association identifies warehouse photography as one factor in spreading the local style. Exhibitions around Fukushima drew visitors who came to photograph the town’s storehouses and encountered its ramen while eating locally. Later promotion through ramen built on a town where dining halls and everyday noodle eating already existed, bringing its soy-seasoned regional style to a wider public.

A reconstructed Rairaiken opened at the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum in 2020, drawing on documentary research, testimony and collaboration with the founder’s descendants. Its account uses pork, chicken, vegetables and dried sardines added from the early Shōwa period, and distinguishes bamboo-pressed noodles from machine-made ones used after 1935. The museum explicitly describes a reconstruction with gaps, rather than a perfect recovery of the old taste.