In some more sad news, the man behind the genius of Nissin’s Cup Noodle — Momofuku Ando — has passed away at age 96.
The story of Nissin’s Cup Noodle inspired the iFanboy manga fave, Project X Challengers: Cup Noodle, which if you haven’t read yet, you should.
Thanks to Tim for the tip!
Have a Cup Noodle in his honor today!
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At 96, I wouldn’t call that sad. I would say life well lived… Just nit picking. I understand the sentament.
Took the Ifanboy suggestion and read this recently. It was excellent!! I had never read a manga book before but it was really worth it. Looking forward to other Project X books.
I was going to buy this right now and clicked through this site to Amazon. Instead I ended ordering Lost Girls for my wifes birthday. Maybe next time.
“Project X: Cup Noodle” is, when I happen to find it, the book I most often hold in my hand and then fail to buy. Once I polish off “Pride of Baghdad” (Thank you, Giftcard Claus!) I will have to pull the trigger and order a copy through the convenient banner above, since it practically begs me to buy that exact book during one out of every three visits to this site.
May the esteemed inventor of ramen rest in peace; thanks to him, I too may make it to 96. He got me through some leeeean times, though I never sampled his cuisine during college, only in the years immediately following. As he was challenging his team to package and formulate those noodles, little could he imagine that one day his creation would be the yardstick with which American twentysomethings would one day define their own failure and poverty. Also, those flavor packets. Dee-lish on any budget.
Being someone who never gave manga the light of day, I took Ron’s suggestion and picked this up. Haven’t finished it yet but so far an excellent read. “At 96, I wouldn’t call that sad. I would say life well lived…”, I couldn’t agree more, 96 is a long time.
Instead I ended ordering Lost Girls for my wifes birthday
Dude, that’s awesome that your wife’s cool with that. She doesn’t happen have a 16 year old sister?
“Dude, that’s awesome that your wife’s cool with that. She doesn’t happen have a 16 year old sister?”
This is funny if Six Gun is 16, but it’s way, way funnier if he’s 37.
That made me laugh hard Jimski, thanx. I was reading the Alan Moore Playboy interview and instead of closing it I minomized it, and low and behold my wife asked my why I was looking at Playboy.com (when I am usually looking at smokinghotmilfs.org. After reading the interview she said I would really like to read Lost Girls, and I thought “hell yeah! two birds with one stone time” because I really want to read it myself, so now I can share my two favorite things with my wife Alan Moore and pornography. Sorry six gun no sisters.
If he was 37 he’d be looking for a 16 year old with an indestructible hymen
bringing it back two months, who’s with me?
Fred, you are a repugnant human being; never change. Keep on reaching for that rainbow.
Fred, you are a repugnant human being;
finally something we can all agree on
This is funny if Six Gun is 16, but it’s way, way funnier if he’s 37.
Sorry to ruin your fun, I’m 16 not 37.
I did mean for the first post to be a joke though, so I’m glad you got a laugh out of it.
Great that so many of enjoyed Project X, and something broke through Ron’s “manga-phobia.” After being in Tokyo so long, I’d be the first to agree that there’s much trash filling the manga shelves, but so too the shelves at the local American comic shop.
Just to share a little background, the Project X book, like so many good things, probably owes its success to being based on great source material. “Project X” is actually a great television documentary series (with great theme music) on NHK (Japan’s BBC). 90% of the show is old film footage of the times and company of the product they are focusing on, and best of all they bring on the always endearing oldsters responsible for whatever product they are focusing on in a particular show. This is in stark contrast to most boring documentary shows here that use some tin-can narrator that sounds like his voice was fabricated in the same NHK factory that produced narrators in the 1960s (I swear, listen to archive recordings and today and it sounds like the same guy).
But Project X is great because it mostly has the real people that worked on the initial project tell their own story, which is probably why is was so easy to translate it to compelling comic form.
I’ve heard a few more issues of Project X are on the way, but the difficulty must be to find a product that resonates with Americans the same way as it does with Japanese, like Cup Noodle. I loved the TV epidsode on the first electric rice cooker, but salesmen and technicians telling the story of how they surveyed finniky Japanese housewives on the right and proper way to replicate home cooked rice and then achieving such a lofty goal in the laboratory might not be as compelling to Americans.
Having seen the average age of the men that come on the Project X show, I’m not surprised one has passed away. Being less than impressed with “hyper modern Tokyo” I’ve always had great regard for the men that brought this country back from the ashes of WWll, usually by kick starting the best known global corporations of today from a single shabby warehouse or even just a garage.
Cheers to the Generation of Post War Showa, ask any Japanese person, they’ll know what that means, a bit like what Americans call “The Greatest Generation.”
I loved the TV epidsode on the first electric rice cooker, but salesmen and technicians telling the story of how they surveyed finniky Japanese housewives on the right and proper way to replicate home cooked rice and then achieving such a lofty goal in the laboratory might not be as compelling to Americans.
That would be awesome.
took the ifanboy reccommendation and picked up this title–LOVED it. My wife, who isn’t much of a comics fan, really dug it as well. It also sparked a craving for Cup Noodles, which we satisfied by picking up a case of the things on our last Costco run…
Has anyone read the latest one about 7-Eleven? I’m curious…
I think Americans could enjoy the rice cooker story too. One of the appeals of the show is that its about “the old days” when companies that wanted to sell product were really determined to find out about what consumers wanted, rather than we consumers having to suffer through what companies think we want….
That’s the problem with imported Manga — all you see is what a small circle of bilingual distributors think you might like, not what you actually like, and why I am so bereft of the really good fanboy stuff here in Tokyo, as chosen by fanboys not the corporate distributors.
I somewhat suspect that 7-ll was chosen for name recognition in the U.S., but I’m with Conor — I think the rice cookers would be more interesting. The appeal of Project X is not the product, but the people “on the journey” so to speak…and the majestic song “Subaru” wells up in the background (“Subaru” means Guiding Star, actually the Pleiades star group).
Bring on those rice cookers! Apparently the inner thermometer which would tell the cooker the rice was done was a big, big issue, as was avoiding overcooked rice stuck to the bottom. It may just look like white fluffy rice, but these Japanese, ESPECIALLY the housewives, are VERY particular… Oy Vey, Hell hath no fury like the passive aggressive fit and fury of a Japanese housewife….
so i asked my comic shop about project x challengers and the owner looked like he wanted to kick me out…but several people in the store went crazyabout it…saying they had read it…
local comic shop owner: “comics from asia arent comics, they are teriaki crap”
“comics from asia arent comics, they are teriaki crap”
i don’t mean to make this all regional or anything but where the hell are you from?
local comic shop owner: “comics from asia arent comics, they are teriaki crap”
That’s what you call a finger on the pulse of the marketplace; bring some take-out teriyaki chicken to his “Going Out of Business” sale.
was the line before that
you ain’t from around here is ya boy
?
ouch.
its a shop in south carolina…that should explain 99% of the comment…the other 1Percent is that he is 65 years old
oh. I went to south carolina once. after which i made a rule about crossing the Mason-Dixon line. i’m looking at you virginia
my apologies to the dozens of people i’ve likely offended
The South isn’t really all that scary. The girls are hot and most of us can read and our football is better!
What the hell does ‘teriyaki crap’ mean anyway? It would make a great band name.
all I’m saying is that the major ironies of my trip to charleston were that if I had gone to Guatemala the people would’ve been better educated and easier to understand as a native english speaker
I’m just joking. I’m sure that it’s very nice and that I just had a bad experience
I did love the ‘most of us can read’ comment
i used to live in charleston….it is slowly becoming a yuppie paradise in the coastal parts….and trashier by the minute towards the inland parts…i think my name is earl is based on a trailer park near the college i attended….
At the University of Kentucky, I had a roommate from Queens. He told a group of us one time that he would be afraid to bring any of us home because his friends would make fun of our accents and we laughed and laughed…
As someone who went to high school in Queens and lived there for about seven years, that’s funny.
His accent was REALLY thick so it was funny to hear him say something like that. He had great stories about his dangerous summer job as a repo-man’s assistant. After college, he ended up staying in KY. The accent is long gone. Well, I guess it’s just been replaced.
there’s a college in Kentucky?
Don’t forget that wonderful man who does “The Golden Age of Comics” podcast is in the South. And isn’t there some really great comics con in the South?
I agree with Jimski – Mr. “comics from asia are teriyaki crap” guy is probably a local shop going out of business not because of the state of the market, but because the owner is a burnt out old arse hole… I hear the South is changing, even Virginia, macaca happens.
Again, too many of us of can’t get the merch we want because of distributors who think they know what we want, but are actually ignorant of what we really want. On that point, I’m probably in the same position in Tokyo as many fanboys in the South and other burbs in the U.S., at the mercy of dumb distributors. And they wonder why people turn to bittorents…
But hey, even if you are a total manga freak, if you came to Tokyo you’d be so submerged in manga crap you’d still feel like Ron looking at a particularly bad run of an X-Men book that he bought, hated, and made him feel like a total X-whore…