Ajisen Ramen Brand Guidelines: A 1968 Kumamoto Shop, Chii-chan & a Hong Kong-Listed Licensee

A Hakka cook, a garlic oil and a seven-tsubo shop.

Ajisen Ramen began in Kumamoto, on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, in 1968. Its founder was born Liu Tan Hsiang in Meinong, in southern Taiwan, a member of the Hakka community, and later took the Japanese name Takaharu Shigemitsu, English and Japanese Wikipedia say. Japanese Wikipedia says he had run property and used-car businesses with two partners before the three visited a popular pork-bone ramen shop in Tamana, north of Kumamoto, and decided to go into ramen themselves. Each went on to open his own shop, and the partners’ shops, Shoubaken and Komurasaki, are also counted among the starting points of Kumamoto-style ramen, the encyclopedia says.

Shigemitsu’s version added fried garlic, an ingredient common in Hakka cooking, to a cloudy pork-bone (tonkotsu) soup, and he first sold it from a street stall in Kumamoto, according to Japanese Wikipedia; English Wikipedia describes the starting point as a Kurume-style tonkotsu adapted with garlic. The chain’s Japanese headquarters says the business started in 1968 in a shop of just seven tsubo, roughly 23 square metres, and that a brown seasoning oil it calls “senmi-oil” gives its white soup its colour and aroma. The Hong Kong group tells the same story in its own timeline, saying the founder chose the name in the hope of sharing his bowl with a thousand people.

The company was incorporated on 5 July 1972 as Shigemitsu Industry Co., Ltd., which still runs the chain in Japan. Japanese Wikipedia says it set up a factory that year to make fresh noodles, seasonings and soup, and began recruiting franchisees. Its headquarters and factory are today in Kikuyo, east of Kumamoto city, according to its website. The founder’s eldest son, Katsuaki Shigemitsu, became president in 1996, Japanese Wikipedia says, and the company’s website still lists him in that post.

A licence to Hong Kong, a listing and a drawn girl.

The first move abroad did not last. In 1994 Shigemitsu Industry opened a joint-venture shop in Taipei, in the founder’s home country; Japanese Wikipedia says it failed, and English Wikipedia says it ended three years later. The turning point came through Hong Kong. Japanese Wikipedia says the businesswoman Poon Wai, also known as Daisy Poon, came across the chain while visiting Kyushu with a Hong Kong trade delegation, and in 1996 opened an Ajisen shop in Hong Kong under a licence from Shigemitsu Industry. Before agreeing, the Japanese company asked her to set up a production plant in China first, the encyclopedia says.

That licence grew into Ajisen (China) Holdings, which the group dates to 1996 with Poon Wai as founder. It was listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong stock exchange on 30 March 2007, under stock code 0538, according to its investor-relations site, which gives a Shanghai address for investor contact. The group says it has built four central kitchens, in Shanghai, Chengdu, Dongguan and Tianjin, since 2012, to supply its restaurants with broth and noodles. In Hong Kong it also runs other Japanese restaurant names, including branches of Tokyo’s Menya Musashi, according to its website. The two companies remain linked: Shigemitsu Industry’s own board, as listed on its website, includes Poon Wai as a director.

Counts depend on who is counting. In February 2019 the trade publication The Moodie Davitt Report put Ajisen Ramen at more than 800 restaurants worldwide, including over 700 in China. Japanese Wikipedia, citing October 2020 figures, gives 66 shops in Japan and 776 in 15 other countries and regions, and says roughly seven in ten of the Japanese shops are in Kumamoto Prefecture. In August 2023 the Japanese headquarters gave about 67 shops in Japan and about 636 abroad.

The brand’s face is Chii-chan, a little girl in a red Chinese-style dress with a braided pigtail, whose image English Wikipedia says appears on the chain’s shops and products. Japanese Wikipedia says she was modelled on the founder’s daughter at about the age of three, who is now the company’s vice-president, and that in Hong Kong the chain was at first nicknamed “pigtail ramen” after the drawing.

Counters, curtains and corporate pages.

Ramen chains often present themselves through the room before the bowl. Ichiran, the Fukuoka chain, seats diners in what Brooklyn Magazine described in October 2016 as “flavor concentration booths”: single stools walled on three sides, with each bowl passed through a rolled bamboo blind. Other chains publish photographs of wooden counters, open kitchens and shop fronts hung with noren, the short split curtains that hang across a doorway.

Menus are usually named plainly. Many chains build their offer around one broth and say so: tonkotsu, the pork-bone broth associated with Hakata in Fukuoka, or the shio, shoyu and miso styles. Bowls often carry short house names; Ippudo, for example, names its two main tonkotsu bowls after white and red circles. Order forms or ticket machines may let diners choose the firmness of the noodles, the richness of the soup and the amount of garlic or chilli sauce, as Ichiran’s paper form does.

The corporate side is published separately. Company pages list founding years, founders and head offices. Some chains are private firms run from their home city; others sit inside listed holding companies that also run udon, soba or other restaurant brands. Overseas branches can be run by the company itself or by local partners, and shop counts change, so the figures in this guide are given with their date and source.

Packaging has become a second shop front. Chains sell boxed noodles, sauces and cup noodles under their own names, some made for them by instant-noodle manufacturers, and those products carry the restaurant names and colours onto shop shelves far from the restaurants.

Franchises, an airport and a dispute over soup.

Not every chapter has been smooth. In 2011 Chinese media reported that the soup Ajisen China’s advertising described as simmered in its restaurants was a concentrate made in factories, and in November that year the Shanghai authorities fined the company for false advertising, Japanese Wikipedia says; English Wikipedia also records the fine. Shigemitsu Industry answered that the matter lay outside the Japanese headquarters’ control, the encyclopedia adds.

Elsewhere the brand travels by franchise and partnership. Japanese Wikipedia lists a New York franchise in 2001 and a first shop in Seoul in 2009, since closed, and English Wikipedia lists outlets from Canada and Panama to Mongolia and New Zealand. The Japanese headquarters says its shops abroad have brought new dishes back into the chain, citing a tom yum ramen built on a Thai soup and shrimp wontons learned from a busy Hong Kong restaurant. In February 2019 the airport caterer SSP Finland opened an Ajisen Ramen at Helsinki Airport, in the new Aukio extension, with 200 seats and a reindeer ramen on the menu; The Moodie Davitt Report called it the chain’s second opening in Europe.

For a design guide, Ajisen Ramen shows how a single drawn character can sit at the centre of a ramen chain’s identity. Compare Ichiran, another Kyushu tonkotsu chain, and Menya Musashi, which the Ajisen group runs in Hong Kong. For this guide we use a warm red, a broth cream and a lacquer black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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