That’s using your noodle!
While most of the international (and Japanese) media reported the death of Mr Instant Noodles last week, few reports mentioned that Ando Momofuku (real birth name: Wu Bai-fu) was a Taiwanese immigrant to Japan — he was born in southern Taiwan in 1910 when Taiwan was a colony of Japan — who did not gain Japanese citizenship until 1948.
I am doing some research about why Mr Ando never paid much attention to his Taiwanese (or Chinese) roots after he arrived in Japan. Was he ashamed to be Taiwanese in Japanese society? Was he fully accepted as a Japanese by his neighbors and co-workers in his early years there? And do most Japanese people (or even those people outside Japan) know that this man was born in Taiwan and only became a Japanese national when he was 38 years old?
[His sister lives in Taiwan today, reports say.
Was his wife Japanese or Taiwanese? I heard she was also from Taiwan. Of course, it doesn't matter to most of us, where a person comes from originally, having lived in immigrant societies most of our lives. But in "we Japanese" Japan, I wonder how Mr Ando was seen. Anybody know?]
Annie Huang, writing in the Taiwan Journal newspaper, notes:
Millions of hungry, busy people around the world make use of his invention every day, yet few know his name. This briefly changed when Momofuku Ando, inventor of the instant noodle and founder of Nissin Food Products, died of heart disease in Japan aged 96. Even fewer people knew that, until he received Japanese nationality in 1948, Ando was originally called Wu Bai-fu and hailed from Taiwan’s Chiayi County. Wu’s early life in Taiwan was revealed in a Jan. 7 article in the Chinese-language Liberty Times. Born in 1910 during Japanese colonial rule, Wu opened clothing stores in Taipei and Osaka while studying at Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, using money bequeathed by his grandfather who ran a clothing store in southern Taiwan.
Anther immigrant success story! But why has the media been so silent about his immigrant start? Or am I wrong about this? With all the controversy sometimes about foreigners in Japan, I wonder how Japanese people see Mr Cup Noodles?
l need sme 1 in nottingham who has a studio l wann becme fam 
perfeckt 10:10
i love all that is hello kitty but pandapple is so cute
I add this note from a comment I read on the Net about this very
issue:
“This stuff, about Ando’s background, does matter and here’s
January 18th, 2007 at 7:53 pmwhy. In the US, people usally do not discussions like this because we
define an American as someone who is a US citizen, plain and simple.
Kissinger (Henry, not Don), Einstein (Albert, not Baby), Kennedy
(John, not Ted), Powell (Colin, not Boog), — all of these people are
Americans despite their being of
Jewish-German, Irish-Catholic, Black-Jamaican descent. But in most
countries, debates like this matter because you are what you are and
citizenship doesn’t really matter. A Korean who has never left Japan
and whose parents and grandparents never left Japan is viewed as
Korean. In Russia, you are a Jew or a Chechen, not a Russian, no
matter how long your family has lived in Russia. The same is true in
France (and don’t anyone try to tell me different on this one). That’s
why it matters. In my view, it shouldn’t matter and I actually think
the fact that it doesn’t matter in the US (for most anyway) is a huge
(and usually neglected plus) for the US.”
Good catch, Danny.
January 18th, 2007 at 8:11 pmAs he was born under Japanese colonial rule and presumably received a Japanese education even before going to Kyoto, he might have considered himself Japanese, as Lee Teng-hui supposedly did until age 20-something.
January 19th, 2007 at 3:31 pmI have learned that the name NISSIN [日清], for his firm, is comprised of two kanji, the first one [日]of course, NI, stands for NIHON or Japan. The second one [清], is a Chinese character for the CHIN Dynasty, when Wu Baifu was born. So in naming his company, he gave credit to both his adopted country, where he was always a gaijin, no matter how hard he tried to japanize himself, name included, and to his birth country/culture, China (Taiwan). I will try to find the kanji later. but this is true. NISSIN is an homage to the two parts of his soul.
日清 = Nissin = Ni-Chin = Ni for Nippon, Chin for Chin Dynasty when Ando Sensei was born!
January 19th, 2007 at 10:58 pmIn memory of the late instant-noodle king, Momofuku Ando, Jeff Yang in San Francisco speaks to notable ramen authorities about the meal-in-a-bowl’s awesome cultural impact — including Robert Allan Ackerman, director of the forthcoming Brittany Murphy film “The Ramen Girl.”
January 19th, 2007 at 11:30 pmHi Danny, do you know for sure that Mr. Ando/Wu was Taiwanese? I’m asking because I haven’t been able to find anything *definitive* either way. I know he’s got a Chinese birthname, but then again, I have Chinese relatives who were born in Japan and have a Japanese birthname! It would certainly lend more credence to what I said about “a Japanese version of a Chinese noodle was popularized by a Chinese person” if he was indeed “racially” Chinese/Taiwanese. Love Japundit, by the way. Keep it up!
January 21st, 2007 at 3:08 pm[...] There’s been a flurry of comments (well, a handful anyway) posted about the late Momofuku Ando 安藤百福 and his racial background. One of our readers “Z.A.” took me to task for referring to Mr. Ando as a Chinese person, and the New York Times> also claims that Mr. Ando’s parents were Japanese, while Danny Bloome of Japundit and the Los Angeles Times make a case for Ando-san being Taiwanese. Taiwanese news sources also claim that Mr. Ando’s parents are Taiwanese, not Japanese. [...]
January 21st, 2007 at 4:15 pmmany people do not realize that in japan, people of korean and chinese descent have historically had to “hide” their minority status by adopting japanese names to avoid prejudice. this is a practice that continues to this day.
January 22nd, 2007 at 8:48 amIncidentally, Ando-san is not the only massively influential figure to have come out of Japan who happened not to be ethnically Japanese. Rikidozan, the founder of puroresu (Japanese pro wrestling), was actually a North Korean named Kim Sin Rak.
January 22nd, 2007 at 9:02 am…the New York
Times, in its official obituary of Ando which was reprinted in several
newspapers around the world and remains online, wrote that
“Ando was a son of Japanese parents who had moved there from Osaka,”
adding that “when he was 23, he returned to Japan.”
The New York Times needs to correct its online website to reflect that
January 22nd, 2007 at 1:47 pmfact that Ando’s parents were not Japanese at all. They were both
ethnic Chinese people born in Taiwan. Furthermore, Ando did not
“return” to Japan when he was 23, as the New York Times reported,
since his trip to Japan in 1933 marked his first visit to that island
nation.
The New York Times issues a correction on January 27, noting that indeed, Ando was born of Chinese parents in Taiwan.
February 19th, 2007 at 12:29 pm