Menya Musashi Brand Guidelines: A Tokyo Ramen Shop of the “Class of 1996”

An apparel man opens a ramen shop.

Menya Musashi opened in 1996 in Aoyama, Tokyo. Japanese Wikipedia gives the opening date as 14 May 1996 and the founder as Takeshi Yamada, who had run an apparel company and wanted to build a ramen shop unlike those that came before. The opening shop was in Minami-Aoyama, the ramen columnist of ASCII.jp wrote in September 2020; Bunshun Online noted in February 2022 that the Aoyama shop has since closed. Japanese Wikipedia says the original shop moved to Kanda in 2009 and reopened there under a new name.

The opening year matters to ramen writers. Bunshun Online, publishing an extract from a book by the ramen writer Ken Aoki in February 2022, described three shops that opened in 1996 — Chūka Soba Aoba in Nakano, Menya Musashi in Aoyama and Rāmen Kujiraken in Yokohama — as the “Class of ’96,” and argued that they laid the foundations of modern ramen. The ASCII.jp columnist gave the same grouping in 2020, calling 1996 the year that turned ramen’s popularity into a boom. The company uses the term too, on the vision page of its website, where it says it set out in 1996 to build a ramen shop that was a pleasure to eat in.

What set the Musashi bowl apart, both writers say, was fish. The soup used dried saury, made to order by a fisheries company, in a Japanese-style soy broth. Bunshun Online added the choice between a lighter assari bowl and a richer kotteri one, and the habit of limited-time menus, as part of what the 1996 shops introduced.

Shinjuku, jazz and named shops.

In 1998 the company opened in Shinjuku, on a side street off Otakibashi-dōri, and moved its head shop there, ASCII.jp reported. Bunshun Online called the Shinjuku shop groundbreaking in many ways for its time: smart staff uniforms, jazz in the background, a meal-ticket machine, a shouted call as the noodles were drained, and coloured glasses for women customers. Japanese Wikipedia adds that the company does no advertising and relies on press coverage and word of mouth.

The brand then grew as a group of differently named shops rather than copies of one. Japanese Wikipedia calls them “double brand” shops, Menya Musashi plus a second name, and says each shop manager decides on taste and pricing, so that the ramen differs from shop to shop; ASCII.jp made the same point in 2020, counting 14 shops in Tokyo. The company’s store list includes Bukotsu in Okachimachi (2003), Kodō in Kichijōji (2005), Kanzan in Kanda (2009) and Niten in Ikebukuro (2012), among others. Japanese Wikipedia’s chronology adds Bukotsu Sōden in Ueno and Kosho in Roppongi in 2011, a shop in Kamata in 2013, Shibaura Honkan in 2014, Hamamatsuchō in 2016 and Gorindō in Nishi-Shinjuku in 2018.

Each shop has a house speciality, the company says. Bukotsu serves a pork-bone ramen in white, black and red versions, the black made with squid ink; Kanzan grills its chashu in the manner of eel kabayaki; Gantora in Akihabara smokes pork belly into what it calls chashu bacon. Japanese Wikipedia says the company keeps its Japanese shops inside Tokyo, a policy it describes with the old phrase monkai fushutsu, roughly “not to leave the house.”

Ramen and noodle bars.

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.

Tsukemen, a renamed head shop and tie-ups.

Leadership passed from the founder in 2013. Japanese Wikipedia says Jiro Yatogi joined the company in February 2001, at 24, managed the Bukotsu shop from 2003 and later the Shinjuku head shop, and became the second president in November 2013. Under him the company put more weight on tsukemen, noodles dipped in a separate soup, which Japanese Wikipedia says now outsell ramen across the shops. The company’s own profile names Menya Musashi Inc., based in Nishi-Shinjuku, with Yatogi as president and May 1996 as the founding date.

In August 2020 the Shinjuku head shop closed for a month’s refit and reopened on 21 August as Sōshi Menya Musashi, “the origin,” ASCII.jp reported. The renewal brought dried saury back into the soup, offered light, rich and garlic versions of the ramen, and served thick noodles from the maker Kanejin Shokuhin. The company’s website now describes the Shinjuku shop as the head shop of the Musashi group, with a double soup of pork-and-chicken stock and a fish stock of bonito and dried sardines.

Musashi is also known for tie-ups. Japanese Wikipedia lists a Valentine’s menu made with Lotte’s Ghana chocolate from February 2009, repeated in later years, a chocolate cup noodle developed with Circle K and Lotte in 2010, and a ramen with the APA hotel group in 2012. It also says that from May 2021 the company opened delivery-only brands that do not use the Musashi name, beginning with a hot-dog brand, Tiger Dog, run from the Kichijōji shop, and that Menya Musashi placed fifth overall in the TRY Ramen Awards for 2019–2020, run by the publisher Kodansha. Abroad, it lists Menya Musashi shops in Taiwan, China, Malaysia, the United States, Ukraine and Poland, and the company’s website invites partners for overseas shops.

For a design guide, Menya Musashi shows how one parent name can hold a family of shops, each with its own second name and dish. Compare Afuri, another Tokyo ramen company, and Ichiran. For this guide we use black, a lacquer red and a cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Menya Musashi’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.