Picture this, my friends.
Ramen and curry, two of the most beloved dishes in Japan,
the one that you'll find on basically every single kind of street corner,
in every convenience store,
in the daydreams of homesick students and salarymen alike.
And neither of them is
I I mean neither of them is actually Japanese.
At least not originally, anyway.
Which, for anyone listening or watching,
that should sound pretty obvious for at least curry,
but you know maybe ramen is the one that surprises you.
Ramen is something that comes from China.
Curry came from India by way of the British Navy.
Both arrived as foreign curiosities,
eaten by the few and misunderstood by just about everyone,
at least in the beginning.
And yet within a century, Japan didn't just adopt them,
it built them from the ground up,
or I should say it rebuilt them from the ground up.
It filtered them through war, through famine, through industrialization,