Two guys from Japan are building a social network for ramen lovers

While working for Japanese tech giant Fujitsu in the 1990s and 2000s, Toru Domon had a lot of opportunities to travel around the world. A native of Sapporo, the largest city in Japan’s northernmost (and most sparsely populated) island of Hokkaido, he had moved to Kawasaki – on the bustling outskirts of Tokyo – to pursue his career as a communications engineer. The job required him to attend up to 10 overseas conferences a year to learn about wireless communication standardization.

“The more I traveled, the more I could expand my worldview,” he tells Tech in Asia. “I realized that I wanted to make a global company of my own. I saw that the local economy in Hokkaido was going down, so I wanted to go back to Sapporo and try to create jobs there.”

Sapporo is known across Japan for the beer that bears its name, an annual snow festival, and miso ramen. Miso ramen, which combines fermented soybeans and an oily broth most commonly made from chicken or pork stock, is the king of noodle dishes in Sapporo and across much of Hokkaido. Corn, butter, and sliced pork chashu are ubiquitous toppings. Little did Domon know that ramen, his favorite dish, would become the basis of his future business.

After 20 years with Fujitsu, Domon parted ways with the company in 2005 and headed back north to pursue his entrepreneurial dream. Taking note of the iPhone’s growing popularity in Japan after SoftBank’s landmark agreement with Apple in 2008, Domon decided that his company would develop iOS apps – with a local Sapporo twist.

Noodle obsessed

Throughout Japan, people often profess their love for the local ramen style the same way that sports fans obsess over their home team. Domon, a self-professed miso ramen devotee, decided to tap into this national – and indeed global – ramen craze by creating an app-based social network for noodle addicts.

“I eat ramen at least 15 times a month,” he says. “Most Japanese probably eat ramen once or twice a month, so heavy eaters like me are a smaller – but more passionate – demographic. The App Store had a lot of general ramen apps, but nothing for the hardcore ramen fanatics.”

Domon’s startup, Clear Inc., launched “Mainichi ga Ramen” (which means “Ramen every day”) for iOS in January 2014 as an alternative to both general dining apps and ramen-specific apps that allow users to rank the shops that they visit.

“Our app is more about making a ramen record to share with other ramen lovers,” Domon explains. “Reviews, like those on Tabelog (Japan’s largest restaurant review site with over 50 million monthly active users), aren’t really useful because they are subjective – everyone has a preference about how hard or soft the noodles are, or how thick or thin the broth is. I might love a bowl of ramen that you hate, so sharing is more important than rating.”

No stars necessary

Mainichi ga Ramen does have a ranking system of sorts, but not based on individual reviews. Shops trend within the app based on how often they are visited. The system is both fair and logical – people will return to shops they like, while less savory establishments will be visited once and then avoided. It’s more like a digital word-of-mouth recommendation than the typical star ranking.