Ramen is young. Sushi carries centuries, tempura arrived with the Portuguese in the 1500s, and ramen, the dish the world now treats as Japan's signature, is a little over a century old and started as an import. The word itself is the Japanese reading of the Chinese lamian, hand-pulled wheat noodles, and the dish began when Chinese cooks started serving noodle soup to Japanese customers in the port cities.
The port years
After Japan opened its ports in the 1850s, Chinese communities settled around the docks, and by the late 1800s the Chinatowns of Yokohama and Kobe were selling wheat noodles in a light chicken or pork broth, seasoned the Chinese way. Japanese cooks ate it, learned it, and adapted it. The first Japanese-owned shops selling what they called shina soba, Chinese noodles, appear in the records of the early 1900s, and Tokyo's Rairaiken, opened in 1910, is the shop most histories credit with setting the template: a shoyu-seasoned bowl, assembled with the speed of a Chinese kitchen and the discipline of a Japanese one, run by cooks trained on a production line.
The rename
The dish carried the name shina soba, or later chuka soba, for decades. After the war the word shina, which had curdled into a slur through the conflict, was dropped, and the country settled on ramen. Language moved faster than recipes. The bowls themselves kept cooking the way the port cooks had built them, and the three-part architecture of every modern ramen, stock, tare and noodles, is the port years' architecture with better hygiene.
Post-war hunger and the noodle machine
Two forces finished the dish. The first was scarcity: after the war, cheap American wheat flooded Japan, and noodle stalls fed the country from handcarts in the black-market years, which is why ramen carries a working-class memory that sushi never will. The second was machinery: fresh-noodle machines put decent noodles in every shop without a master's hands, and the menkui, the noodle-obsessed eater, was born with them.
The boom decades
The 1980s and 1990s turned ramen into a national sport. Television sent hosts across the country to rank regional bowls, young cooks opened one-man shops with their own soup philosophies, guidebooks awarded stars, and in 1994 the Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum opened as a physical atlas of the regional styles, nine shops under one roof, so a Tokyo family could eat Sapporo, Hakata and Kumamoto in an afternoon. Ramen had finished the journey from Chinese import to Japanese canon.
Then the world
The same decades exported it. Japanese ramen shops crossed into Hong Kong, Singapore, and the West Coast, instant ramen colonized every supermarket on earth, and today you can eat a creditable tonkotsu on most continents. The origin story is the reason we exist, too: a food connoisseur from Hong Kong visited Kyushu, tasted the soup of the south, and built a restaurant around it, first in Hong Kong in a chain of five, then in Singapore from 1999. The bowl travelled the same road in reverse, and it landed at 3 Pickering Street.
If the subject hooks you, the article on the ten ramen types and the north-south split continue the story, and the China piece traces the noodle back upstream.