In a scene from Juzo Itami’s 1985 film “Tampopo,” a group of executives walk along a riverfront. A young subordinate carries their briefcases — the lowly kaban-mochi (bag carrier).
Inside the private dining room of a French restaurant, he stumbles, drops the bags and gets smacked by his manager. He sits before the senior executives do, is yanked up by the collar by his boss and placed in the shimoza, the low-ranking seat nearest the door and the spot most exposed to intruders in feudal times.
Yet when the menus arrive, he becomes an unexpected standout. The execs, stumped by the French terms on the menu, follow a colleague’s lead and order the same things: soup, sole and beer.
When the maitre d’ reaches him, the junior orders the quenelles in caviar sauce, noting the dish’s origin at Le Taillevent in Paris. His manager kicks him under the table to signal that his deviation is making the group uneasy, but he ignores him.
He chooses escargots wrapped in pastry for his main and caps his display of gourmet knowledge with a pointed line: “Since this morning, I’ve been in the mood for Corton-Charlemagne. Do you have a 1981 vintage?” The maitre d’ summons the sommelier. The young man now beams with confidence as his seniors look down in embarrassment.
Dismissed moments earlier, he now holds the highest status in the room — doing what many young salarymen wished they could do to their bosses but never had the quenelles to try.
“Tampopo,” now a cult classic, is filled with scenes that use food to frame Japan’s social dynamics. In the French restaurant sequence, for instance, Itami skewers collectivism-versus-individualism alongside the rituals of corporate etiquette.
“Like nearly all of Itami’s movies, ‘Tampopo’ is something of a filmed essay on contemporary Japanese culture and society, and human nature in general, served up with a black comic spin,” says longtime Japan Times film critic Mark Schilling. “This approach was not totally new in Japanese films — director Kon Ichikawa had made social satires in the 1950s — but Itami differed from his contemporaries and seniors by being a published essayist as well as having acting and TV personality credits on his resume.
“Thus, the criticism that he was an intellectual who made films first from the head, not the heart.”
With “Tampopo,” though, Itami clearly made it from the gut, too.
The film’s story isn’t all about high-end dining, though. The central cuisine isn’t French but humble ramen. Itami called the movie a “ramen Western,” a parody of the Italian-made “spaghetti Westerns” popularized by director Sergio Leone and actor Clint Eastwood. Here, the antihero isn’t a poncho-clad drifter but Goro (Tsutomu Yamazaki), a truck driver in a cowboy hat who wanders into a struggling ramen shop and helps its widowed owner-chef, Tampopo (Nobuko Miyamoto), improve her mediocre broth.
The quest for the perfect bowl drives the narrative, but it’s the film’s vignettes that elevate it beyond an underdog-chef story. These sketches expand “Tampopo” into a sharply comic exploration of our relationship with food — and a lively critique of the cultural forces that shape this connection.
From ramen to egg yolks
The movie’s vignettes, including the French restaurant scene, have no narrative link to the main plot, yet Itami binds them visually to Tampopo’s ramen journey through clever camerawork. In one transition, he pans away from Tampopo jogging along the riverfront to the executives heading to the restaurant. The shift is seamless — a testament to his ease with his craft.
Born in Kyoto in 1933, Itami began his film career as an actor, landing roles in Yasuzo Masamura’s “A False Student” (1960) and Nagisa Oshima’s “Sing a Song of Sex” (1967). It was on the set of the latter where he met Miyamoto, whom he married in 1969.
Itami’s directorial debut came in 1981 with “The Funeral,” for which he earned best picture at the Japan Academy Awards. His other titles include “A Taxing Woman” (1987) and “The Last Dance” (1993), but his suicide in 1997 cut his career short. Rumors still swirl around the circumstances of his death, but Itami remains one of the country’s top directors. “Tampopo,” his second movie, is widely considered his masterpiece, capturing the zeitgeist of mid-1980s Japan.
“The year the film was made was the height of the bubble economy, with the crash still several years off,” says Deborah Shamoon, an associate professor who specializes in Japanese popular culture at the National University of Singapore. “There was rampant consumerism and social climbing, often based on mastering ‘high status’ aspects of Western culture, including food.”
She adds that the film parodies that social climbing by depicting how food as a status symbol can be upended. “(Itami shows that) food is something everyone can have an opinion about.”
That democratization of taste is one of the movie’s clearest themes. The junior executive in the French restaurant turns out to have the most refined palate. Tampopo’s advisers are blue-collar workers — Goro’s truck-driving partner Gun (a young Ken Watanabe) and a chauffeur named Shohei — who critique each new version of her broth. In another vignette, a group of beggars reveal themselves to be wine connoisseurs, with a preference for Bordeaux.
Long before the internet allowed anyone to broadcast their opinions on food, Itami anticipated a future where connoisseurship is no longer tied to class or credentials. Today’s foodie influencers are essentially the digital descendants of Goro and his crew.
Itami’s elevation of ramen — then a cheap, late-night salaryman staple — into something worth analyzing like haute cuisine was intended as parody. Viewed today, it would look prophetic. The cult of ramen, Michelin stars and all, has outpaced even his satire. The movie’s opening scene of an elderly ramen master teaching Gun how to enjoy a bowl has now become a de facto tutorial on ramen appreciation on social media.
“The idea of making a movie around ramen was radical at the time,” says Shamoon. “It was cheap food that was overlooked and ignored. It wasn’t the same as high-class French food.”
James Farrer, a sociology professor at Sophia University specializing in food, argues the film didn’t just foreshadow Japan’s foodie culture but helped create it. “Tampopo” was “instrumental in creating the image of Japan as a nation of B-grade gourmets,” he says, using a term meaning affordable comfort food that rose in popularity during the 1980s.
“It was satirical to have a ramen master explain how to properly eat and appreciate this lowly dish, but today we (accept) that any down-home dish can be elevated,” says Shamoon, adding that the director poked fun at how French cuisine was put on a pedestal while “the food people eat every day can be just as good.”
Itami extends that critique of cultural hierarchies in another restaurant vignette. A refined instructor teaches young women the proper way to eat spaghetti, emphasizing the importance of remaining silent while eating. A Westerner across the room interrupts her class by loudly slurping his spaghetti like it was ramen (Itami cranks up the sound here). The class, intrigued, copies him, and even the teacher gives in. Itami suggests that food etiquette is more porous, more shared, than cultural gatekeepers like to claim.
That playfulness segues into the film’s cheekiest territory: the erotic food scenes featuring Koji Yakusho’s gangster and his lover. They experiment with icing sugar and trap a live shrimp on the woman’s belly under an inverted bowl of alcohol. In a later vignette, they famously pass a raw egg yolk back and forth between their mouths — an act that fuses eroticism and comedy in equal measure. In another vignette, the gangster meets a young oyster harvester on the beach; as he slurps a freshly shucked oyster from her hand, a drop of blood from his cut lip slips onto its flesh, the image loaded with suggestion.
International audiences may still find the scenes risque, but Schilling notes that by 1985, “hundreds of Japanese movies, from the ‘pinky violence’ films of Toei to the (softcore) Roman Porno films of Nikkatsu, had already gone far beyond ‘Tampopo’ in their depictions of the erotic.”
Farrer says that if such scenes don’t fly today, “it is less because we are too ‘woke’ or puritanical and more because we have lost faith that beauty can be found in sexuality.”
Just as daring was Itami’s choice of protagonist. Making the hero a female chef was a radical departure in a male-dominated arena — one that remains largely unchanged today. Tampopo, a single mother and novice chef, strives to improve, the kind of determined character Miyamoto excelled at playing in later Itami films like the “A Taxing Woman” series.
Apart from Tampopo, women in the film largely inhabit domestic roles. Even so, Itami’s satire ensures there’s always a twist. In one vignette, a dying woman rises from her sickbed at her husband’s command to cook one final meal for her family. She collapses immediately afterward as her children tearfully finish the dish.
Taken literally, the scene suggests a woman cannot leave this world until she has completed her domestic duties. Shamoon says Itami is skewering that notion, pushing “the idea of the self-sacrificing mother to its most ridiculous extreme.”
In a Japan where gender roles remain deeply ingrained, that critique may hit harder now than it did in 1985.
A delicious legacy
“Tampopo” was a flop when it opened in Japan. To date, the movie has managed a domestic box-office of ¥600 million — half of what "The Funeral" earned. Schilling recalls watching it at the time “in a nearly empty theater and being just about the only one laughing.”
“(The movie) may have been too far removed from the lives and tastes (of Japanese people) in its approach and sensibility,” he says. “Japanese comedies then, and even now, tended to be broad and their characters lovable dimwits. Itami, on the other hand, was a pessimist whose movies had what he described to me as ‘a dose of poison — they say that the Japanese are no good.’
“So the satire in ‘Tampopo’ may have been too ‘poisonous’ for local audiences to swallow.”
Abroad, though, critics and audiences slurped it up. The late movie critic Roger Ebert called the film “one of those utterly original movies that seems to exist in no known category.”
The movie’s cult status means it continues to be revisited — and discovered — by film buffs and foodies alike. Forty years on, it still appears in Japan- or food-themed film festivals around the world: At the Reykjavik International Film Festival in September, the audience was served ramen before the movie began; next month, Hong Kong’s Film Programmes Office will include it in its “Food for Thought — A Cinematic Feast” festival.
As one of the first foodie movies, Schilling says, “‘Tampopo’ paved the way for the many food-themed movies to come.”
The late 1980s and the mid-1990s brought a wave of food-centric films that proved to be critical and commercial hits, such as “Babette’s Feast” (1987) and Ang Lee’s “Eat Drink Man Woman” (1994). Though they were not inspired by “Tampopo,” Itami’s film arguably primed critics to take such works seriously.
It also helped spawn similar “underdog ramen chef” stories, including “The Ramen Girl” (2009), starring Brittany Murphy, and Singapore’s “Ramen Teh” (2018), whose title is an amalgamation of “ramen” and bak kut teh, the local pork rib broth. None, however, come close to Itami’s particular blend of charm and bite.
“‘Tampopo’ was the first cinematic commentary on the 1980s gourmet boom, so it has a kind of historical importance,” says Schilling. “But more than that, it is still funny as a comedy and incisive as a social documentary. I think it will endure, even though Itami himself was something of a one-off. There's really no one like him today, which is our loss.”
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