Rice pizza, noodle ices: Food shows Japan’s punk rock soul

COUNTRIES’ foods are also windows on their souls. Take hamburgers. Hand-held, quick to assemble and wolf down, they embody a quintessentially American idea that founding father Benjamin Franklin put to paper in 1748 and which still powers the ambitious on Wall Street and beyond. “Remember,” Franklin wrote, “that time is money.”

In China, food is so omnipresent in the national psyche that people greet each other with the phrase “chi fan le ma?” — have you eaten? And French food snobbery prompted the famously omnivorous President Jacques Chirac to once quip unkindly of the British that: “One cannot trust people whose cuisine is so bad.”

Which leads us to the Cup Noodles Museum in Yokohama, Japan.

Yes, there is such a place. And, yes, instant noodles have plenty to say about Japanese traits of inventiveness, risk-taking and an openness to adapting and upgrading foreign influences that helped Japan recover after