Ramune: The Soda That Arrived on Perry's Ships

Ramune is the bottle with the marble in it, and almost everything about it is a piece of history that got stuck in place and never moved again.

It Came Off a Warship

In 1853 Commodore Perry sailed into Uraga to force Japan open to trade. Aboard ship, his officers served lemonade to the shogunate officials who came to negotiate.

That is generally taken as the drink's arrival in Japan. Whatever else those meetings set in motion, they also introduced a fizzy lemon drink to a country that took to it immediately.

The name is what happened next. Lemonade is difficult to say in Japanese, so it got worn down in the mouth until it came out as ramune. That is the whole etymology: a foreign word that lost its edges.

Commercial production started in 1872, when Chiba Katsugoro began making and selling it in Tokyo.

The Marble Is a Patent

The bottle is a Codd-neck, invented by the British engineer Hiram Codd, also in 1872.

The problem he was solving was that carbonated drinks pushed corks out. His answer was to put a glass marble and a rubber ring inside the neck and let the drink seal itself: the pressure of its own carbonation forces the marble up against the ring from the inside. No cork, no cap, nothing to buy separately. You open it by pushing the marble down with a plunger, and the shoulders of the bottle are shaped to trap it so it does not block the flow while you drink.

Japan started importing these bottles in 1887 and was soon making its own in Osaka.

Then the interesting part: the Codd bottle disappeared almost everywhere else. Crown caps arrived, they were cheaper, and the marble bottle went extinct across Britain and America. In Japan it simply stayed, and it is now one of the few places on earth where a Victorian bottling patent is still in ordinary commercial use.

There is a nineteenth century public health footnote too. During cholera outbreaks carbonated drinks were widely believed to help, and ramune was sold on that basis, which did its early popularity no harm at all.

Why It Tastes Like Summer

Ramune is bound up with matsuri, the summer festivals. It is sold from ice-filled tubs at shrine stalls alongside shaved ice and grilled squid, and for most Japanese adults the taste is inseparable from being a child at a festival in August.

Flavours now run well past lemon-lime into strawberry, melon, lychee, grape and yuzu.

At Juraku

We keep rotating seasonal flavours on hand, and they are genuinely for everyone, which is not something most of our drinks list can claim.

They also mix. Ramune with shochu or yuzu vodka is a straightforward good idea, and the bottle does half the work for you.

If you have never opened one, ask and we will show you. There is a technique, and there is a way of getting it wrong that sprays the table.