Much like the commonalities of dumplings across east Asia, ramen presents an interesting case for cross-linguistic and cross-cultural comparison. Let’s begin with the word and then talk about the actual food item. As pictured above on the lantern, “ramen” is written with the Japanese kitakana script, which suggests–despite its entry into English from the Japanese–that it is in itself a loan word. The beauty of blogging is that I can posit wild speculations without actually doing any research to verify this.
So, Korean uses a similar word as fitted to its phonetic system: 라면 (ra myeon). We should remember from the post on zhajiang mian that “myeon” is a functional morpheme in Korean for noodles and related to the Chinese character 面.
In China, ramen is rendered 拉面 (la1mian4), but this word is better translated as hand-pulled noodles and is most associated with the northwestern (read: Muslim) parts of China. Most notably, 拉面 pretty much also refers to freshly made noodles, while the instant packs are called either 方便面 (fang1bian4 mian4, “convenient noodles”) or 泡面 (pao4 mian4, “soaked noodles”).
So this is the key difference. We tend to associate “ramen noodles” as cheap stuff college students live on, while there is really a major difference between that kind of ramen (inspired by pulled noodles) and the real pulled noodles. To the best of my knowledge, in Japan ramen refers exclusively to fresh noodles (though the real star is the soup stock with every region of Japan claiming to make the best kind), while China uses different words, and in Korea, ramyeon either refers to the instant noodles or the kind served at a Japanese restaurant.