how to make a book about ramen
hint: find a team of perfectionists
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In 2006, two friends and I started a quarterly newspaper. More accurately, JY had the vision, Z had the layout and design skills, and I hopped on board for everything writing and editing-related. The (private) school we attended didn’t have a student-run publication at the time. We had lofty goals, chief of which was that we would be entirely “self-funded” to maintain editorial independence.
Raising funds through bake sales — sometimes I baked chocolate chip cookies; other times, we re-sold J.CO doughnuts at a markup — just about covered our printing costs. We published quarterly, which in hindsight was ludicrously ambitious for the resources at our disposal, i.e. being chronically understaffed and over-subscribed to schoolwork and other extracurriculars at all times. I also wish I could say that our publication had been truly free of external oversight; in practice, each issue was scrutinised by the head teacher before it went to print. It wasn’t though we’d had much to censor (it was difficult finding anyone who wanted to write for any reason other than bulking up a CV), and our articles reflected the narrowness of our school-focused lives, but I’m still inordinately proud of the sarcastic, blistering op-ed on the questionable uses of our eye-watering tuition fees penned by AL, a close friend who remains so to this day. Naturally, that piece went straight to the chopping board.
After graduating from university, I stayed away from writing and publishing for a few years, in the belief that you couldn’t make a living out of it. You still can’t, for the most part, but I couldn’t not write any more than I could give up rice. Several years of freelance writing and one essay collection later, I’m no closer to living off writing than before (and I wouldn’t want to, now), but I did find myself at the helm of a publication, along with a team — something I didn’t think I’d ever do again.
Since 2018, I’ve rarely worked with other people beyond freelance clients; my contact with clients tends to be focused and limited, the deliverables discrete and unambiguous. That changed in late 2022 when I cajoled David into letting me join the sankaku editorial team to produce a book about ramen. Essentially: You’re making a book about ramen? I want in.
(Long story short, I met David back in 2017 while on a writer’s program in Ishinomaki. He was working at a furniture startup. We became Facebook friends, and he moved to Tokyo a year or so later. We met up once and then didn’t see each other again for a few years. In 2021, when COVID vaccines were being rolled out across Tokyo at an uneven pace, A encountered a post on Reddit about a clinic in Setagaya offering vaccines on a first-come, first-served basis. I hurriedly signed J and myself up for shots. At the same time, I happened to see David online on Messenger and wrote to him: vaccine appointments without voucher, no questions asked. The three of us were jabbed one after the other, went for drinks after, and… the rest is history, sort of.)
David and I had only just graduated from “Facebook acquaintances” to “friends” while getting vaccinated together the year before, so I’m still hazy on how I managed to blag my way into their close-knit team of four. Regardless: here we were now, a team of five working between Tokyo and Canada, making a book from scratch, in between our respective full-time and/or freelance jobs.
A quick elevator pitch: sankaku is a craft-focused indie print publication. It’s not quite a magazine; I want to say it might be closer to that “mook” space between book and magazine. At this point, we’re publishing one volume a year, which is just about manageable with the people and resources that we have. I joined in time to lead content for Volume 02: Ramen; we’re now staring at the mountain of tasks looming ahead of us for Volume 03. (Help!!!)
By the time early 2023 rolled around, I’d been dabbling in freelance food journalism for a few years — pouring days of research, interviews, transcription, and writing into producing 800 to 1,500-word pieces, to be published once and then pretty much never heard of again. I believed in the stories themselves, but they also began to feel like so much ephemera in the deluge of web content. There was rarely scope or budget to work on more involved pieces; there were so many stories in Japan that hadn’t been covered in English, but were often considered “too niche” or uninteresting for most English-language publications (that paid reasonable rates); there was only so much I could do as one writer.
I saw an opportunity to write these stories with sankaku — some measure of creative control over the kinds of stories we could tell, things that would add to the literature and existing conversation on a subject instead of repeating extant talking points. This, and the idea that I could make something beautiful, something worth reading and owning, something bigger than anything I could do on my own.
They say your thirties are about rediscovering what you loved as a teenager, this time without the accompanying shame, uncertainty, or hang-ups. I would also add that it’s about doing those things better — the benefit of more life experience, along with a greater sense of joy and fun. Being involved in sankaku feels like running the newspaper again, but better.
All of us come from wildly different professional backgrounds and fields (advertising, design, travel, traditional crafts, IT, engineering, architecture, etc). All of us are detail-oriented in different ways, so we can often cover for each other’s shortcomings. It’s like an extended group project, but one where everyone pulls their weight. It’s still chaos, but at least there are other people equally committed to weathering the chaos with you.
As anyone who has worked in publishing knows, making a book is a hideously involved process. The content for Volume 02 alone was a mammoth task: brainstorming article ideas based on the theme (ramen), finding and commissioning writers and illustrators for particular pieces, writing briefs for said pieces, dropping certain articles because we didn’t have the resources or connections to make them happen, David do we have the budget for this, multiple rounds of interviews for the pieces we wrote in-house, writing the pieces, editing the pieces, writing, editing, layout (courtesy of design genius Polly), finessing page counts, David we need to clean up this interview transcript, fact-checking, editing, Stanley could you have a look at these pieces, layout, editing, layout, oh shit hey David we need to write an Editor’s Note, more editing. That’s before printing and everything else afterwards. Sometimes I look at the 146-page book on my shelf and think, holy shit, we did that.
Each sankaku volume comes in two versions: a regular paperback, and a hardcover Collector’s Edition. Good writing will only take you so far; if we’re going to the trouble of printing a book, it should also be beautiful and interesting. In this case, we wanted to —
A quick fact-check with David:
Me: David what it is you always say about pushing the boundaries of what a book can be?
David: lmao what do i say? i say a lot of shit
–– make the book (as object) visually and physically represent the content. In other words, the book is about ramen; how can we make the book itself ramen?
I remember suggesting early on that the Collector’s Edition could literally be the “noodle brick” of a “ramen packet” you ripped open, where the packet also had a nutritional content table (with, say, book stats, contributor names/counts), and book-related marketing copy and blurbs in place of, say, cooking instructions. It didn’t stick, but David, Sugai-san (who really should be called Sugoi-san), designer Noda-san, and the bookbinders experimented for several months, beginning with noodles made from paper clay — we got close to replicating the shape of noodles, but you could still tell they were made from clay — and eventually settling on the simplest solution: To make a book represent ramen, stick an actual brick of noodles on the cover. Duh.
Ramen noodles are light but prone to breaking; how were we going to put it on a book and make it stay in place? Sugai-san’s engineering-tech background gave us the answer: vacuum forming, where you heat a sheet of plastic until just-malleable, then stretch and force the plastic against the noodles using a vacuum. It makes this loud, discordant, but oddly satisfying vvvwwheeeeeeoooosh sound. Getting the timing right is tricky. Heat it too long and the plastic melts. Try moulding it too soon and the plastic doesn’t completely adhere to the noodles.
To save on costs, we rented a small thermoforming machine in a factory somewhere out in Katsushika Ward and spent two days making the plastic-formed covers by hand (instead of outsourcing this to the factory). Or rather, David, Sugai-san, and Alvin (another friend) worked the machine, and I did the mise en place, opening ramen packets, stacking the bricks and bringing them back and forth from the machine, building pyramids of emptied ramen packets and flavouring sachets, sweeping crumbled-off bits of noodle into a larger packet.
Most of the first day was trial and error. I wasn’t sure we were going to finish on the second day, but we managed, somehow. Several rounds of QC later and some careful packing into cardboard boxes — with lots of help from Eileen, our project manager/events person — we delivered them to our bookbinders, who then had the unenviable task of assembling our book covers by hand. It was a pretty incredible process, parts of which you can view here and here.
The finished Collector’s Edition is impossible to shelve — it’s a coffee table book — but looks so fucking cool. We’ve participated in a few art book fairs since; I was at the KL Art Book Fair in December, and I can’t tell you just how many people have done double takes while walking past this book. Is that… real? Are those real noodles? It’s an incredibly tactile object. People pick up the book and don’t even realise they’ve started stroking the plastic covering the noodles.
Then there was everything else that came along with, and after making the book. David and Sugai-san worked with Stacy (super lovely Singaporean designer) and Maruhiro (Hasami ware company) to make our very own ramen bowl, plus stickers and T-shirts. That was a whole other thing. We had the coolest book launch party in a bathhouse last November, along with talk panels and live music, including Lullatone. What a dream. (If you’ve watched Perfect Days, it’s that bathhouse.) Over 260 people turned up, which is a pretty decent turnout for an event we barely did any meaningful publicity for besides a few social media posts.
It doesn’t end with the book launch, though. As cool as I know the ramen book is, a product doesn’t sell itself, and six months on, we’re all still part-time booksellers. That part doesn’t change. We’re now stocked in indie bookstores across 9 countries, including my beloved Lit Books in Malaysia (who hosted a How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart book event last summer), and Sailosaibin in Tokyo. David is often printing labels, and packing and shipping books across the world, since most of the books are taking up space at his and Sugai-san’s apartments; sometimes I write the thank you notes, or send cold emails to various outlets. Sugai-san has skillfully wrangled our book into several bookstores in Tokyo; Stanley hits up cafes and bookstores in Toronto to see if they’d like to sell our book. We tell friends. We tell family. We tell total strangers on the street. I have seriously considered adding something about sankaku to an online dating profile. I mean, who wouldn’t swipe right on a ramen book?
We’re working on Volume 03, which has been magnitudes more challenging since we’re now working all our full-time gigs and selling Volume 02 to fund the production of this third book. Volume 02 was partially funded by a traditional craft-focused government grant, the rest bootstrapped. Volume 03 is being funded by revenue from Volume 02, and maybe a local government body will decide that we will write some stories worth sharing with the world, and cover our travel costs to their part of the country.
Sometimes I fret and stress over just how much needs to be done. Occasionally I wonder if I made the right decision, signing up for this in the first place. More than half of us are self-employed; don’t we basically all have like, five different jobs per person already? (David: that’s why i want you to chill lol. i need you. pls *lion emoji*) But fuck, sankaku is probably one of the best choices I’ve made in my life. It’s so fun working with people who get it, who want to create something beautiful, nerdy, thoughtful, nuanced, fun, maybe even funny at times, and importantly, as free of Japan stereotypes as we can make it.
Anyway, wish us luck for Volume 03. We’re going to need it! Especially if we’re going to get it out by November! And if you’d like to order a book (or several, or a bowl) from us, it makes an awesome gift for the ramen lover in your life.
PS: The Collector’s Edition is currently only available as part of a gift set, but we’ll be releasing a few more standalone copies from June 2024. Watch the shop space!