Matt Goulding

there is unquestionably no town in Japan more dedicated to ramen than Fukuoka. This city of 1.5 million along the northern coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan’s four main islands, is home to two thousand ramen shops, representing Japan’s densest concentration of noodle-soup emporiums. While bowls of ramen are like snowflakes in
Japan, Fukuoka is known as the cradle of tonkotsu, a pork-bone broth made milky white by the deposits of fat and collagen extracted during days of aggressive boiling. It is not simply a specialty of the city; it is the city, a distillation of all its qualities and calluses.

This is our fifth bowl of ramen over the past eight hours, and I’ve reached my limit, but Kamimura shows no sign of slowing down. He looks over at me and eyes the small puddle of pork broth and tiny tangle of noodles before me. “You going to finish that?” It’s not a clever technique to inspire me to soldier on; it’s a legitimate desire to leave no soup unslurped. For every bowl I eat, Kamimura eats two—not for research (he’s been to all of these places dozens of times), not to avoid waste (all nonramen food that makes its way to the table is essentially ignored by him), and certainly not because he’s hungry (by my back-of-the-napkin math, he is ingesting north of 5,000 calories’ worth of ramen a day during our time together). No, Kamimura does it for the same reason he reviews packaged ramen at home
and feeds his baby boy pork broth and makes his wife pull over every time they drive past an unknown shop: because his dedication to ramen is boundless. He doesn’t love ramen like you love pizza or like I love The Sopranos; he loves ramen like Antony loved Cleopatra.

In Japanese, you would call Kamimura an otaku, one with a deep, abiding dedication to a single topic. A nerd. Otaku commonly describes manga fanatics and video game savants. But just like the chefs he admires, Kamimura is a craftsman, and his commitment to ramen writing approaches shokunin status, a dedication so all-consuming that everything else in his life is a footnote.

k The Untold History of Ramen, George Solt p