Fancy French restaurant cooking is a 19th century phenomenon. American cuisine was big on aspics in the 1940s.

Ramen is newer, but definitely is something that the Japanese care about and identify with.

Sounds like you know more than I do on this but wouldn't there be lots of soba analogs in japan already?

I may be mistaken, but Ramen (as noodles in broth with toppings) strikes me as a fairly obvious dish once you have a kind of noodle and broth.

Soba is made of buckwheat so its really an very different type of dish, but Ramen used to be just called "Chinese Soba", since wheat based noodles are very different from rice or buckwheat.

Ramen specifically uses wheat noodles. "Modern Japanese Ramen" took Chinese recipes that used wheat noddles and used them to great effect during the American occupation with extremely cheap wheat prices (compared to other choice). You can be damn sure without cheap American wheat, Ramen would have stayed as Chinese Soba

It's one of those things that make people uncomfortable because history is messy.

"American wheat" is inconsequential. Ramen is the Japanese word for la mian which means pulled noodles.

So your history lesson isn't uncomfortable but wrong.

Ramen (and Japanese-style breads, among other dishes) were popularized during and after the American occupation, in which American wheat flooded the Japanese market in unprecedented quantities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_the_Occupation_of_Japa...

The parent says that "ramen" would not have existed if it was not for America. That is wrong, it already existed.

He is referring to the term "Sh*** Soba", which is impolite to utter in modern Japanese (chuka soba is fine).