Japan: So Weird, So Awesome (Episode 1, Love Hotels)

I'm excited to announce that Ramen Chemistry is going to Tokyo next month for a ramen and culture tour.  Among other things, I will experience wonderful food, strange and magical toilets, and, best of all, a week-long holiday from having to understand literally anything that is spoken in my general vicinity.  The blogging opportunity inherent in such a trip should be self-evident.  To get ready, Ramen Chemistry will warm up with a few posts about things Japanese.  Starting now with "love hotels."

Hotel Queen Elizabeth. I'm sure Her Majesty is honored.

Japan: Full of Surprises

To be sure, any American's first trip to Japan is something of a revelation.  My first trip in 2003 was no exception.  The most pedestrian places, supermarkets and convenient stores, were worlds of fascination.  Strange sights, stranger sounds, an overabundance of cuteness.  You get what I'm saying.  But I'll tell you this: nothing--nothing--prepared me for the epic weirdness of that very curious and very ubiquitous Japanese phenomenon, the love hotel.   

Allow me to set the stage.  We were making our way from Tokyo to Kyoto, and had stopped in the Izu Peninsula to meet Hiroko's childhood friend.  When we needed a hotel that night and didn't have a reservation, Hiroko thought a love hotel might be convenient and educational for her American boyfriend (who, by the way, had never previously left the United States).  It was late enough to get a room.  Love hotels, it turns out, won't rent you a room for the night until as late as 10 or 11 p.m.  Before that, you can only rent the room for a couple-hour "rest."  You don't make a reservation at a love hotel.

Will It Be a "Stay" or a "Rest"?  Rate chart for a love hotel.  A "stay" is overnight, and a "rest" is a few hours.  

We found a place--Hotel 555--and pulled into an underground parking garage.  There, we found a succession of parking stalls, a special one dedicated to each room in the hotel.  Lots of the stalls were full when we arrived.  But get this--covering the license plate of every parked car was a  portable screen.  And we paid for the room not by going to a check-in counter, but by inserting cash into a payment machine in our garage stall.  The machine gave us access to the room; we never even got a key.  This was new.  This would be educational.  

Cloak-and-Dagger.  Love hotel parking lot. http://thejapans.org/tag/hotels/

We entered our room through a door in the back of the stall, and found slippers waiting for us at the threshold.  One does not wear shoes inside in Japan in domestic quarters--ever--even in a love hotel.  The room was pretty unbelievable, at least to my naive American eyes.  A garish pink cupid hung above the gigantic bed and a disco ball hung from the ceiling.  And what amenities!  Baskets of condoms, bottles of oils and lotions, a karaoke machine, video games and DVDs, blue and green underwater lights in a gigantic jacuzzi tub, a tv loaded with porno channels (with all the sensitive parts blurred out, per Japanese law), and, strangest of all, a small display refrigerator containing beer and Haagen Dazs for purchase.  And dildos.  Right there, next to the ice cream.  

Love Hotel Menu.  Just pick your room, press the button, and you're set.

Multibillion Dollar Industry

Apparently there are 25,000 love hotels in Japan (another report says 37,000).  It's a $40 billion industry.  Love hotels are usually found around places like highway interchanges or city outskirts.  They usually have funny non-Japanese names: Hotel Patio, Hotel L'Hermitage, Hotel Chapel Christmas, and my personal favorite, Hotel Seeds.  The exteriors are often thematic (i.e., castle theme) but sometimes non-descript or windowless.  But it doesn't take long to be able to identify a love hotel anywhere you go in Japan.  The combination of name, signage, and location will almost always give it away.

Good Old Hotel Seeds.  This is a pretty common image in Japan.  

Inside the love hotel, there's often a menu of room choices.  The rooms might be distinguished by theme (a new take on Hello Kitty, for example), by decor, or by the presence of a special piece of sex furniture (what does that even mean, right?).  There are pictures of the rooms, descriptions, and you pick the one you want.  Here's a link to the room selections at one Hotel Seeds (yes, it's a chain).

But don't get the impression that these places are necessarily seedy.  Never forget we are in Japan here. The Japanese are pretty fastidious and they highly value, even expect, good customer service and cleanliness.  So love hotels are properly thought of as mainstream and respectable businesses.  Customers are often young adults who happen to be much more likely to be living with their parents into their 20s than are their U.S. counterparts, and who require more privacy than they can get at home.  On the other hand, it should be obvious to you that Hotel Seeds isn't the Mandarin Oriental.  

A documentary called Love Hotel came out last year, set in Osaka's Angel Love Hotel.  It's streaming on Netflix (so I just learned).  It's now in Ramen Chemistry's list and set for immediate viewing.

Hello Kitty.  I didn't expect to see you here.  And certainly not in handcuffs.

The Pneumatic Tube

Love hotels operate based on a principle of total anonymity. During your stay, the odds are you will never see anyone face-to-face.  Not a concierge, not a maid, nobody.  If you need customer service you talk to somebody on the phone.  This is why those cars had screens over their license plates.  

Usually, you pay a machine, but sometimes even more elaborate and gratuitous schemes are used.  I once saw a room where you pay upon departure using a pneumatic tube (think bank drive-throughs), that shuttles between your room and an office in another part of the hotel.

Please Pay Here.  Pneumatic tube facilitates the anonymity of the Japanese love hotel.  Photo credit: Karl Baron.

This level of anonymity pretty clearly sells in Japan.  Undoubtedly it lowers the barrier to rent a room, easing customers past their inhibitions.  I'm also guessing that a lot of people like the secrecy thing as a fun part of the overall experience.

After Hotel 555, I confess I made Hiroko take me to love hotels a few more times.  It's a pretty extreme cultural novelty, and there was always some over-the-top or absurd detail that made the amusement alone worth the trip.  The other thing, believe it or not, is that there aren't a whole lot of economy hotels on Japan's roadways.  So if you're traveling, it's late, and you don't have reservations, you'll find that instead of a Comfort Inn at the highway exit, there's a love hotel.  

If you are interested and want to read more about love hotels, click here, here, and here.  There's a ton of stuff on the web, but these links are a good starting point.   

Branding Step One: Choosing the Right Name

We settled on the name Shiba Ramen long before we were remotely serious about starting a company, back when this project was just some obscure weekend fantasy, bandied about in between billing hours at the firm and changing diapers at home (fyi, the only thing that's changed in the intervening 9 months is that today we actually work on the business in between billing hours and changing diapers).  Shiba Ramen was intuitive to us, and we never seriously considered a different name.  Let me explain why.

Muses.  Our shibas, Momo (white) and Toro (red)

A name is significant.  If you're a business, you make a conscious choice when you select your name.  You hope it helps customers identify and connect with you.  You want it to be easily spoken, and easily remembered.  And you want it to say something about you, to be part of your narrative.  Shiba Ramen is both functional and personal, and that's why we chose it.  We think it works for our business at the same time it says something about us.  

Distinction Is Critical

The first point is that the word "Shiba" is distinctive, just as a business's name needs to be to set it apart from its competitors, or even from general background noise.  It is an arbitrary word in that it has nothing to do with ramen, noodles, or even food.  Not many other companies or products (if any) use this word, at least here in the U.S. 

There's also an important legal reason to have a distinctive name, if you want intellectual property protection for your brand.  Federal trademark law is based on protecting distinctiveness.  The law gives the most protection to brand names that are "arbitrary" or "fanciful"--i.e., names that don't suggest or describe the nature of the product, either because they are entirely made-up words or because they are common words that don't hint at anything about the underlying product.  

Think about names like Xerox, Apple, Starbucks, and as the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office notes, Old Crow Whiskey (a good friend of mine in college, as it happens).  Names like this are "inherently distinctive" so that the government will grant a trademark without much red tape.  If you choose a name that describes your product (lets make up an example--"Noodles Ramen"), you have to prove to the government that customers out in the marketplace actually associate that name with you.  That's a real practical difference:  by using Shiba Ramen, I can apply (and have) for my trademark now and expect to get it, but if I picked Noodles Ramen, I'd probably have to be in business for quite a while and develop a serious reputation before the government would be willing to put its weight behind my alleged economic interest and give me a trademark.  

So Are Authenticity and Accessibility 

"Shiba" is short--five letters, two syllables--and easy to remember in English.  That's important, and it ties into the second reason we chose our name.  Shiba is a Japanese word.  We wanted to use a Japanese word to emphasize that our product is authentically Japanese, that it's the real thing, done the right way.  Also to reflect Hiroko's Japanese heritage, which is important to us and to our family.  

Hamamatsu Ramen?  Naming our business after Hiroko's hometown (for example) just wouldn't have the same impact.

But if we're intent on a Japanese name, it has to be something that is easily remembered and passed along by westerners.  If a name is too foreign, I think it's just harder to remember.  We have a harder time internalizing sounds that don't follow a familiar pattern.  Shiba is a word that I think people can get.  One reason for this I think is that "Sheba" with an "e" is a word we're already familiar with in the West, probably because of the biblical Queen of Sheba.  More than one person has mistakenly spelled our company's name with an "e".  The point is that Shiba (we think) strikes the appropriate balance between authenticity and public accessibility.    

Wrong Shiba.  But maybe the Queen of Sheba makes our name easier to remember.  The Meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, Circle of Juan de la Corte (Belgian), early 17th Century

Crazy About Those Dogs

The third reason for our name is personal, and explains why it was so easy for us to commit to calling ourselves Shiba Ramen.  The literal translation of "shiba" is "brushwood," but shrubs are beside the point.  It's the shiba inu ("inu" is Japanese for "dog") that we care about.  The shiba inu is the iconic Japanese fox-like dog with pointed ears and a curly tail.  We are dedicated and enthusiastic owners of two of these unique and amazing dogs, Toro and Momo.  Crazy about these dogs, to be honest.  Like really nuts.  I'll write more about them later. 

Shibas are universally associated with Japan; they're a cultural icon of sorts.  And they've become really popular in the U.S. over the past decade or so (fueled, perhaps, by the shiba "puppy cam" that was viral on the Internet a few years ago).  So the shiba--this very Japanese image--is slowly entering the American cultural vernacular, just as the word is starting to enter our language.  Our name comes with built-in imagery, and the imagery in turn acts as a hook to help people remember our name.    

Dogchildren.  Toro and Momo in 2013

Now you understand why we are Shiba Ramen.  Ramen Chemistry would have been a good alternative, for a lot of the reasons I've explained (we are former chemists, after all), but we think that name fits better with the theme of this blog. 

Next time, I'll explain how we went about creating our Shiba Ramen logo.

Creating a Brand: Japanese Food, American Business

Later this year, we're going to open Shiba Ramen (details soon!).  We want our new business to be a success.  That means--to state the obvious--we a steady stream of customers who like our product and are willing to come back for more.  But how do we get those customers in the door in the first place?  And how do we get people to recognize and remember us?  Doing that requires more than just serving a tasty product.  We have to build our brand.  And then we have to project it.             

Shiba Ramen Logo.  In an upcoming post, I'll explain how we got here by taking readers through our inspirations and creative process.

I've been thinking about branding ever since committing to the Shiba Ramen project.  The scope of this question continues to expand as we hammer out the details of our restaurant concept, and put the whole thing into motion.  The importance of branding, of creating positive associations and spurring customer recognition, seems to apply with special force in the super-competitive restaurant market, in which consumers are literally saturated with reasonably comparable choices.  

Over the next couple of posts, I'll explain what we're doing to create our brand in the early days of our business, before we've even served a bowl of ramen.  The purpose is to illustrate what goes into starting a consumer business and share our approach.        

Primary Considerations: Name and Logo

We've started from the assumption that name and logo are key.  It is usually through them that a business has its first chance to make an impression.  Customers see a restaurant's logo and hear its name before they ever walk through its doors, let alone eat its food.  They also give non-customers the means to identify and communicate about a business.  I'd bet that an awful lot of non-coffee drinkers know exactly what a green mermaid signifies out in the marketplace, giving them the ability to tell their coffee-drinking friends where to find the closest Starbucks.

A Face I'd Recognize Anywhere.  Chances are, so would most people.

Beyond impacting conscious brand recognition, name and logo operate subconsciously to influence our choices as consumers.  Choosing a restaurant is a zero-sum thing; if a customer eats at a different restaurant, he doesn't eat at yours.  The odds are that there are number of pretty comparable choices in terms of product and price, so things like image and aesthetics are what tip the scales.  The way a logo appeals to us may well cause us to give one business a chance at the expense of another.  Logos signal something to us, implicitly setting up our expectations about the business behind the logo.  

Unforgettable Name.  I've seen only one of these places in my life-Iowa City, 2003-but the name was permanently imprinted in my memory.  

The point is that I'm looking for a name and logo that not only cause people to recognize and remember my business, but also cause them to form positive subconscious associations and expectations about it.  I have a lot of levers at my disposal--quality and cost of my product, look-and-feel of my physical space, customer service, etc.--to deepen the customer's impression, hopefully in a positive way, but only after the customer has already decided to patronize my business.  I need to make people want to come and eat our ramen in the first place.  And I need to give them easy ways to remember us after they've left, lowering the barrier to a return visit or a recommendation to a friend.     

Japanese Food With a Brand?  Does That Exist?

Here's one way we want to be different:  we want to serve authentic Japanese food while simultaneously placing a heavy emphasis on brand building, starting with name and logo.  Why do I think this is a differentiator?  Well, can you think of many Japanese restaurants with a recognizable brand?  A name that's catchy, or a logo that really stands out?  My guess is that if even if you can, the number is likely pretty low.  Even as we increase in generality from ramen shops to Japanese restaurants to Asian restaurants, I can't think of too many examples where strong branding has been deployed to create broad market awareness (let's set aside mega-chains like Panda Express and P.F. Chang's).  

LA Area Ramen Restaurants.  Jinya Ramen Bar's approach is similar to ours. It's name and logo are much easier to remember than the others. Apparently that was the intent. We're going a step further by using a more English-friendly name and animal imagery in our logo.  

One reason for this, I think, lies in the nature of the food and the identity of the restauranteur.  Most Japanese restaurants are run by Japanese nationals who are first and foremost chefs--not businessmen--and they go for the Japanese feel.  Usually small owner-operated places focused on the food, not brand recognition, and catering to a small geographical area without thoughts of expanding to multiple outlets. Their logos, if they have them, are often indistinguishable from one another, at least to western eyes.  Too many Japanese language characters, and too much use of calligraphic brushstrokes.  More modern logos seem to almost always use the image of a bowl of noodles.

This is not to disparage the aesthetic qualities or the elegance of such designs, not in the least.  The point is that a logo should be distinctive of your brand, and these kinds of logos just aren’t doing much differentiating.  In the end, we Americans simply don't have the cultural background we need to make sense of symbols and imagery that resonate perfectly well in another cultural context.  I'll say it again (three times):  context, context, context.  We might be serving Japanese food, but we're an American business.  That's how we're thinking about this.  

Next time, I'll tell you why we decided to call our restaurant Shiba Ramen.   After that, I'll take you through our logo design process.

Umami Science Part IV: Inside the Venus Flytrap

And now we come to umami science at its most fundamental: the chemical process that plays out in our taste cells when we eat savory foods and experience umami.  

Umami, we've learned, is caused by the glutamate present in abundance in ramen's ingredients, and amplified by nucleotides through the phenomenon known as "umami synergy."  But how exactly do these molecules make us perceive umami?  In the final installment of Ramen Chemistry's series on umami science, we're going to answer that question by visiting the surface of a taste cell, where a venus flytrap (of a molecular sort) lurks on the surface.  This venus flytrap has an appetite for just one thing--glutamate, preferably with a side of nucleotide--and when it bites down on a meal, it sets off a cascade of cellular signals that causes the brain to say "delicious!"  

Venus Flytraps.  Well, not this kind of venus flytrap.  Conservatory of Flowers, GG Park.  Photo: Ramen Chemistry.  

Background: Sensory Perception and Cellular Communication

We learned in Part II how the "basic tastes" all derive from the interactions of particular dietary molecules--i.e., glutamate (umami), sugars (sweetness), acids (sourness),  sodium chloride (saltiness)--with chemical receptors on the surface of taste cells.  There is a special receptor for each basic taste--one for sweetness, one for umami, and so on.  It's important to understand that when I use the term "receptor" here, what I mean is a protein; a protein that sits on a taste cell and makes physical contact with a taste molecule like glutamate or sugar.   

Taste Signaling. Those things marked "T1R2, T1R3" are the venus flytrap receptor proteins that recognize sweet chemicals, setting off a chain of chemical events inside the taste cell, ultimately causing the brain to perceive sweetness.  Umami works the same way.  Image www.qiagen.com (full link here).

This interaction between the taste molecule and its protein receptor is the first step in the perception of taste.  It starts what scientists call a signal transduction pathway.  Signal transduction is how we perceive and respond to external stimuli, and how our cells communicate with each other to get anything done in our bodies.

Now, don't let your eyes glaze over at the sight of a term like signal transduction!  It's easy to understand.  It works like this: a stimulus--a taste or smell molecule, light, a hormone, a neurotransmitter, etc.--starts the process by interacting with a receptor protein on a cell surface.  The receptor protein responds to the stimulus by changing its shape and, in effect, turning "on." That shape change ripples through the cell surface, causing something to happen inside the cell. What follows is a cascade of events in which a succession of proteins is turned on, each causing the next event in the molecular sequence.  The end result is a precise physiological response--the taste of umami, the scent of jasmine, or the perception of the color blue.      

Umami and the Venus Flytrap

We just learned that the first step in any taste process occurs when a taste molecule causes a taste receptor protein to change its shape.  In the umami receptor, that shape change happens in a part of the protein called a "venus flytrap domain" (VFT).  The VFT is made of two lobes connected by a sort of atomic hinge.  Those lobes can be open or they can snap shut, which is why its called a venus flytrap.  Under normal circumstances, the VFT prefers to be open. It's more stable that way.

Tangential Relationship.  Ramen from Ramen Kyouka, Hiroko's ramen school teacher's restaurant in Tokyo (left). Venus flytrap (right). 

Things change when glutamate comes along.  That's because right near the VFT's hinge is a tiny pocket that is specially adapted to fit a glutamate molecule.  When glutamate enters this pocket, its atoms interact with the atoms in both lobes, causing the two lobes to close around it.   Glutamate acts as a molecular glue, increasing the stability of the closed VFT.  This is hugely important, because the closed form of the VFT is the active form: an umami taste signal is sent to the brain only when the VFT is closed.  

Umami Signal Cascade. When the VFT closes around glutamate, it causes a shape distortion in another part of the umami receptor, triggering a series of molecular events resulting in umami taste.

It turns out that this opening and closing of the VFT also explains umami synergy.  Inside the VFT there are actually two pockets.  One for glutamate and another, further from the hinge, for the nucleotides IMP and GMP.  Umami synergy occurs when glutamate is in its pocket, and IMP or GMP is simultaneously in the adjacent nucleotide pocket.  The nucleotide, in essence, increases the strength of the glue, making the closed VFT even more stable.  The more stable the closed VFT becomes, the more umami signal is sent to the brain.  

Synergy Happens in the Flytrap. Glutamate (yellow) up against the VFT's hinge.  IMP (green) sits next door, at the mouth of the flytrap. The contacting amino acids in the VFT surround.  This 2008 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled "Molecular mechanism for the umami taste synergism" showed the molecular basis for umami synergy: http://www.pnas.org/content/105/52/20930.full

And with that, we've finished umami science.  I have tried to write this series for scientists and non-scientists alike, and it's my hope that all readers have learned something new.  Up next, Ramen Chemistry will get back to the business of starting a restaurant.  Stay tuned.  

Umami Science Part III - Umami Synergy

Have you ever thought about why we dip sushi in soy sauce?  We know it makes the fish taste a lot more delicious, but why?  Today we'll learn that when we combine the glutamate in soy sauce with the nucleotides in fish, we amplify the umami taste sensation well beyond what either ingredient alone produces.  This fascinating phenomenon is called umami synergy.

Umami synergy involves the relationship between umami-causing glutamate (MSG) and two additional molecules, the nucleotides inosinate (IMP) and guanylate (GMP).  IMP and GMP do not cause umami on their own.  But when present alongside glutamate, they are capable of amplifying the umami taste fifteen-fold.  Not only is the umami taste magnified, it is more sustained and longer lasting, too.  This phenomenon, only recently unraveled at the molecular level, plays a role in worldwide cuisine, driving us to combine ingredients rich in glutamate with those rich in IMP and GMP.  

Umami Synergy. Please stop by the soy sauce on the way into my mouth. Thx. REUTERS/Issei Kato

Maximizing Umami Taste: Umami Synergy

Umami synergy is a sort of culinary gestalt: the whole is far greater than the sum of the parts. Glutamate produces umami.  Nucleotides (GMP and IMP) by themselves produce no umami. Together, they produce an umami sensation that dwarfs the sensation caused by just glutamate.  

This phenomenon has a significant influence on the foods we eat.  One source explains that "major world cuisines have traditionally relied on umami synergy for deliciousness by combining protein foods with IMP and vegetables with glutamate."  We've learned how umami synergy drives the flavor of Japanese dashi broths, by combining the glutamate of kombu with the IMP of bonito flakes or the GMP of dried shiitakes.  But Western cuisine is full of examples, too.  Tomato sauce (glutamate) combined with meat (inosinate) in pasta Bolognese; cheeses (glutamate) and beef (inosinate) in French onion soup or cheeseburgers; and cheese plus anchovies (inosinate) in Caesar salad.  The point is that humans implicitly understood umami synergy, using it to their culinary advantage, well before "umami" was discovered in the early 1900s.  

Now let's talk about the umami compounds and why they're in our foods.  Then we'll learn how the ways we prepare our food increase the concentration these molecules, maximizing our umami taste experience.   

Umami Synergy.  This is a new way to think about beef stew. Umami Information Center.

The Umami Compounds

The fact that our foods are often rich in glutamate, inosinate, and guanylate isn't surprising. Present in every living thing, these molecules are absolutely central to biology on our planet.

As we learned in Part II, Professor Kikunae Ikeda discovered umami in 1908 when he extracted purified glutamate from kombu.  Just a few years later, one of Ikeda's students, Shintaro Kodama, succeeded in identifying IMP as an umami compound when conducting studies on katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes).  It wasn't until 1960 that another Japanese scientist, Akira Kuninaka, uncovered GMP's umami-enhancing properties when he isolated it from shiitake mushroom broth. Kuninaka also discovered the umami synergy phenomenon.

Glutamate, as we've learned, is an amino acid.  Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. Proteins, in turn, are large amino acid polymers, characterized by complex three-dimensional structures and sophisticated biological functions.     

Amino Acids and Proteins. Structures of the 20 naturally occurring amino acids, called as such because they possess an "amine" (NH2) group and a carboxylic acid (COOH) group. Glutamate at lower right (left). Proteins are chains of amino acids that fold themselves into highly complex three-dimensional structures (right).  

All of the amazing complexity and diversity of proteins derives from just 20 amino acid building blocks in mammals.  Of those 20, the human body can synthesize only 10.  We have to get the other 10--the "essential" amino acids--from our food.  And unlike fats and starches, our bodies don't store excess amino acids; we need to consume them on a daily basis to keep all our internal trains moving on time.  Amino acids have a range of important biological functions beyond just populating proteins.  For example, our entire umami discussion here is premised on free glutamate's role in triggering a complex cellular signaling pathway en route to the taste of umami.  

Recipe for "chicken stock with umami synergy" at http://umami2u.blogspot.com/2012/12/chicken-stock-with-umami-synergy.html.

IMP and GMP, in contrast, are nucleotides.  Nucleotides are the building blocks of the nucleotide polymers, DNA and RNA.  Three things make a nucleotide a nucleotide is (1) a 5-carbon sugar, connected to (2) a phosphate group, and (3) a nitrogen-containing ringed structure called either a purine or a pyrimidine.  Inosinate is the common precursor to two of the five nucleotides used in DNA and RNA, adenylate and guanylate (the other umami nucleotide).  Free nucleotides--like ATP, the fundamental currency of energy in living things--are just as important in biology as their polymeric counterparts.  IMP is high in meats and fish because muscle cells in animals need a lot of ATP to function.  One source explains that "[o]lder animals with very well exercised muscles tend to have more umami, as do fish that are heavy swimmers, such as mackerel, salmon, and tuna."  In fact, it's well-known that older stewing hens make better chicken stock than young birds do (see here, here, and here).

Nucleotides. Phosphate connected to sugar connected to base. Nucleotides are responsible for umami synergy. http://www.uic.edu/classes/bios/bios100/lectures/dna.htm

Maximizing Umami Compounds: The Power of Cooking and Fermentation

Just as important for our food discussion is the fact that these biomolecules--proteins, DNA, RNA, ATP--are broken down after an organism dies, increasing the amounts of glutamate and the umami nucleotides in the food source that the organism becomes.  

The key thing to note is that food preparation has a significant role in maximizing umami.  As one author explains, "[p]rocesses such as cooking, boiling, steaming, simmering, roasting, braising, broiling, smoking, drying, maturing, marinating, salting, ageing and fermenting all contribute to the degrading of the cells and macromolecules of which the foodstuff is made."  Enzyme-mediated breakdown through processes like fermentation is particularly effective in bringing out umami.  

One great example is katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes):  drying the bonito fish can increase the inosinate concentration 30-fold as cellular ATP is broken down!  The same principle applies at sushi restaurants, where the tastiest tuna has likely been aged for a few days before service to a customer, maximizing its umami.   

ATP Breakdown = Umami.  Well, for a while.  ATP content is high in animal muscle, because it is needed to power contraction.  ATP stops being produced after an animal is slaughtered, and immediately begins to degrade.  Inosinate (IMP) is produced within 24 hours, but degrades further in subsequent days.  Increasing amounts of inosine and hypoxanthine indicate decreasing freshness.  http://www.novocib.com/Freshness_Assay_Kits.html.

Next time, we're going into some serious science here at Ramen Chemistry.  We're finally ready to understand how umami happens at the molecular level.  Stay tuned.