Ippudo Brand Guidelines: A 1985 Fukuoka Ramen Shop, Shiromaru, Akamaru & a Listed Group

A Fukuoka ramen shop named after a band.

Ippudo began on 16 October 1985, when Shigemi Kawahara opened a ramen shop called Hakata Ippudo in Daimyō, in Fukuoka’s Chūō ward, Japanese Wikipedia says. In Japan the chain still trades as Hakata Ippūdō; abroad it uses the name IPPUDO. English Wikipedia gives the meaning of the name as “one wind hall” and says it was chosen because the founder wanted to blow a fresh wind through the Kyushu ramen trade. Japanese Wikipedia quotes Kawahara saying that this is the official explanation, and that the real reason was a band he liked: Ippū-dō, the Japanese new-wave group.

Japanese Wikipedia says Kawahara set out to change the image that Hakata ramen shops had in the 1980s, with stylish shops that a woman could comfortably walk into alone, a rich pork-bone soup and noodles developed in-house. A company to run the business, Chikaranomoto Company, was set up on 30 October 1986 with Kawahara as founder, and it became a joint-stock company in 1994.

The move out of Kyushu came in March 1994, when Ippudo opened in the Shin-Yokohama Rāmen Museum, its first shop in the Kantō region. In 1995 it opened its first Tokyo shop, in Ebisu, and launched the two bowls that still anchor its menu: Shiromaru Motoaji, the white-circle original tonkotsu, and Akamaru Shinaji, a mildly spicy red-circle version. Japanese Wikipedia says Kawahara won the ramen-craftsman contest on the TV Tokyo programme TV Champion in 1997 and again in 1999 and 2000.

Shiromaru, Akamaru and a cup with Nissin.

Ippudo’s menu is built on those two names. Japanese Wikipedia calls Shiromaru Motoaji and Akamaru Shinaji the chain’s two flagship bowls, served alongside versions with extra toppings, soy-sauce and miso ramen, side dishes such as fried rice and gyōza, and kaedama, the extra portion of noodles that is part of Hakata ramen. In New York the red bowl is sold as Akamaru Modern. Time Out New York, in a review dated July 2018, called it the house special at Ippudo NY, describing a smooth, buttery soup topped with scallions, cabbage, a slice of roast pork and “pleasantly elastic noodles,” and referred to the founder as the “Ramen King.”

The chain adds seasonal bowls around that core. Its Japanese website says a miso version of Akamaru has been sold each winter since 2012 and reworked a little every year, and it marked the chain’s 41st anniversary in 2026 with a chicken-broth bowl that, the site says, went on sale at the same time in 16 countries and regions. Japanese Wikipedia describes a series of creative ramen events, “Shiki no Rāmen,” from 2001, and a workshop programme from 2003, held in places such as primary-school halls, in which children make ramen and gyōza.

The name has also travelled beyond the shops. In April 2000 a cup noodle carrying the Ippudo name went on sale through 7-Eleven, made by Nissin, Japanese and English Wikipedia say, and an online shop followed in November 2009. From 2011 the chain opened shops inside JR East stations around Tokyo through a tie-up with Nippon Restaurant Enterprise. Since June 2013, Japanese Wikipedia says, Ippudo has supervised the ramen served in first and business class on some All Nippon Airways routes, and in December 2022 the two companies began serving a plant-based ramen they had developed together.

Rooms, bowls and owners.

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.

From one shop in Daimyō to a listed group.

Ippudo went abroad in 2008, with a shop in New York’s East Village at 65 Fourth Avenue; a second New York shop, on the West Side, followed in 2013. The holding company’s overseas page says that since the New York opening the chain has spread to 15 countries and regions. Japanese and English Wikipedia give the dates: Singapore in 2009; Hong Kong and South Korea in 2011; Taiwan, Shanghai and Australia in 2012; Malaysia and Guangzhou in 2013; London, Thailand, the Philippines and Indonesia in 2014; Paris in 2016; and Vietnam and New Zealand in 2019. English Wikipedia says the shops in Hong Kong and Taiwan are run by Maxim’s Caterers.

The business is now a listed group. On 1 January 2014 the original company became a holding company, Chikaranomoto Holdings, with a new Chikaranomoto Company and other subsidiaries beneath it, Japanese Wikipedia says. The holding company moved its head office to Daimyō, where the first shop opened, in March 2017, and listed on the Mothers market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange on 21 March 2017. It moved to the exchange’s First Section on 22 March 2018 and is now on the Prime market.

The group runs other restaurant brands too. Japanese Wikipedia lists Najimatei, a Fukuoka ramen shop founded in 1987 whose operating company it took over in 2015; Inaba Udon, a Hakata udon business founded in 1951 and bought in 2016; the miso-ramen shops Kaede and Kanade, whose operator it bought in April 2025; and a Shinshu soba restaurant, Sobakura, run by its noodle-making subsidiary Watanabe Seimen. From 2015 it ran Panda Express restaurants in Japan through a joint venture with the American Panda Restaurant Group; in 2022 it ended the venture and transferred its shares in the operating company to its partner. Ippudo held a 40th-anniversary festival in October 2025, its website says.

For a design guide, Ippudo shows how two plain colour words, a white circle and a red circle, can carry one menu across many countries. Compare Ichiran, another Fukuoka tonkotsu chain that went abroad, and Nissin, which made the 2000 Ippudo cup noodle. For this guide we use a broth white, a chilli red and charcoal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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