The man behind it was Kaku Meiyu, born in Japan to parents from Taiwan and running a Chinese restaurant in Nagoya called Misen.

Around 1970, the year of the Osaka Expo, he traveled to Taiwan and ate danzai noodles at a Tainan-style place in Taipei. Danzai noodles are a Tainan specialty: minced pork fried with garlic, bean sprouts, a clear light broth. They are not spicy at all. He decided to make them in Japan.

Then he changed them, and the change is the whole story. Chili and garlic chives went in, and the reason for that was his neighborhood in Nagoya rather than anything to do with his homeland.

A great many Korean residents lived around Imaike, where the shop stood, and he judged that something hot would be welcome there. He started serving it in 1971. The name is as literal as it could be: a Taiwanese man made it, so it is Taiwan ramen. He has said himself that what he ended up with does not exist in Taiwan. The shop name, Misen, uses the character sen, immortal, the one applied to people who have mastered something, which tells you what he thought of his own cooking. A dish named after one place, built out of a second, for the people of a third.