Concrete Skateboarding

Raw Men Eat Ramen

photos Matt Price words Jim Fenton

Ramen is a Japanese noodle dish that originated in China. It is served in a meat-based broth, and has toppings such as sliced pork, bean sprouts, dried seaweed, green onions, and even corn. Almost every different region of Japan has its own variation of the soup. On the Momentum Japan Tour, ramen was pretty much a staple for Corey Sheppard, Ted DeGros, Brian Caissie, Matt Price, our Japanese friends Yoshiaki Toeda and Hiroyuki Matsuo, and distributors Yoshio Habuto and Kunjiro Eguchi. So yeah, almost everyone survived on ramen with the exception of the pizza and burger specific diets of Chris Haslam and Magnus Hanson.

“I wasn’t a huge fan of ramen to tell you the truth. But in Japan, holy shit, it’s the best thing,” explains Sheppard. “In Osaka, I would go to McDonald’s with Magpie, but then I found out about the noodle spot.”

Boiling Point

Tokyo-style ramen is made with thin, curly noodles in a soy flavoured chicken broth. It includes all the usual toppings with the addition of spinach. This was our introduction to this heavenly noodle dish. Unfortunately, this was also our introduction to Japan’s hottest week of summer ‘08. Temperatures soared upwards of 34 C with insane humidity.

“Sauna status,” Magnus simply states. Ted adds: “I could never describe how hot and humid it was. Maybe Florida in a heat wave.”

During this boiling point, our first order of business in Japan was one of the only two demos scheduled for the trip at the “Amazing Skatepark.” You could literally fry an egg on the metal ramps that made up the park. Did I mention eggs are usually served in ramen?

“We would sweat like fat kids in heat. Every one of us needed little baby towels – bowels. Or pimp rags. Depending on what scene you were into,” Haslam recalls.

After a few days in Tokyo hitting up noodle bar after noodle bar (and spot after spot), we headed south on a six-hour mission to Nagoya – Japan’s third largest city. Little did we know the heat would not be letting up for our whole two-week visit.

The 20-Minute Rule

Japanese people are notoriously very polite and never want to piss anyone off. Whenever someone asked how far our next stop was, our guide, Yoshio, would answer: “Maybe 20 minutes.” Since the “maybe 20 minutes” answer was repeatedly being used, it became one of the biggest jokes on the trip.

“‘Maybe 20 minutes’ was the shit. Some people want to be polite and not bum you out by saying something is two hours away, so they keep telling you something is ‘maybe 20 minutes’ away for two hours,” explains Ted.

After many hours packed inside the tiny Lego vehicles the Japanese call vans, the night in Nagoya became a blur after a well-deserved sushi and sake session.

Jungle Drop-In

Heading further south towards Osaka, we were driving through some jungle when Caissie yelled out, “STOP!” We pulled the tiny van over to the side of a sketchy narrow road, and we found what Caissie spotted after hiking through the bush. It could only be described as something out of an Indiana Jones movie – a super-skinny brick tranny with a 50-foot drop on either side. Ted manned-up and went to work banging out a couple tricks before Haslam dropped in on the bloody thing. Ted would be awarded with, you guessed it, a steaming bowl of noodles, and Haslam reaped something greasy and delicious. Ramen recipes are a typically highly guarded family secret. Some historians actually believe a stolen recipe was the cause the second Sino-Japanese war. Not wanting to battle any Chinese, we kept our recipes to ourselves and were on our way to Osaka.

Mandatory Mie

We stopped at a not-so-secret shop in a town called Mie, where we would put on the second demo of the trip for the most genuinely stoked and welcoming people we could ever meet: the Morimotos and the B7 East crew. B7 is a mandatory shop-stop for all tours going through Japan. It’s been open for 15 years, and the walls are littered with hundreds of autographed team photos. Our guys ripped the shit out of their cement park for hours, putting on pretty much the best demo I have ever witnessed. Unfortunately, they weren’t rewarded with ramen this time, but with something equally as awesome: a huge barbeque with beers-to-boot.

Spilled Asahi

Osaka isn’t really known for their ramen recipes, but we did find out it’s known for tons of good, security-free spots. Most of our business was handled during the five days we were there. We skated a lot of famous spots like “Brazil” (that huge white over-vert wave thing), and a lot of random spots we just happened to find driving in circles trying to make sense of our Japanese GPS. During one of the last days in Osaka, Yoshio got a call from his promoter friend who wanted us to come to this metal/hip hop show that had a mini. The ramp had one-foot-wide platforms, and the whole thing shook when you skated it. Holes opened up on the ramp throughout the night, but holy shit did we rip that thing in a beer-fuelled frenzy! And it wasn’t just our crew, everyone skated it! High fives and spilled Asahi ended the night off right.

The Ramen Reality

A hot bowl of ramen was a great hangover cure. I think this was mostly due to the fact that it’s packed with sodium, which would partly explain the truckloads of water consumed on the trip. We also found out that ramen is super high in saturated fats and really not good for you at all. So I guess it made sense when Corey would later claim that ramen requires a “110 percent commitment.” But maybe Haslam and Magnus had it right – burgers were the way to go after all.

Thanks to Yoshio, Kunjiro and Big Wing Distribution, as well as Matt Price and Brian Caissie for documenting everything. Check out the full Japan tour video for free online at momentumskate.com

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 12:21 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.