Can women and foreigners help drive a ramen renaissance to keep Japan's noodle shops on the boil?
CBSN
Tokyo — Japan's ubiquitous ramen shops have long served that most-proletarian of dishes at no-frills counters, where customers unceremoniously slurp and gulp their way through boiling-hot bowls of noodles.
But while the ramen joints were long an almost exclusively male domain, the cement-floored greasy spoons of yore are giving way to hip décor, handcrafted crockery, and — hang onto your chopsticks — fusion flavors. And women are lining up.
The story of America can be told through the lyrics of folk music – songs of the Great Depression, the civil rights era, and the social revolutions of the 1960s. As folk singer Pete Seeger put it in 1967, "A song isn't a speech; a song is not an editorial. If a song tries to be an editorial or a speech, often it fails as a song. The best songs tell a story, paint a picture, and leave the conclusion up actually to the listener."