There’s some insight from a QA with the director of this film on a youtube post when I was searching out the writer, Becca Topol:

(original link)

Robert Allan Ackerman, director of “The Ramen Girl,” is a Brooklyn-born, Emmy-nominated theater and TV director and producer who has worked extensively in Japan. Here he tells us how he got stuck into this steaming-hot project.

How did “The Ramen Girl” come about?

Through an e-mail that was sent to me by the writer, named Becca Topol. She had lived in Japan, and she sent me an e-mail saying that she had an idea for a movie about an American girl who becomes a ramen chef.

Why ramen? And how do Western audiences react to the sound of slurping, as ramen is typically eaten?

That was Becca’s idea. She’s a Buddhist, and she was trying to look for a metaphor or some situation in which an American girl was being trained to do something that was so foreign to her. And I think Americans find slurping very offensive, ha ha. They don’t understand it. (But) once they do understand it, they feel liberated, because they can slurp.

What were the challenges you faced?

The biggest challenge that we had was trying to figure out how (Brittany Murphy and Toshiyuki Nishida’s characters) communicated with one another. And then we finally just decided, why don’t they just not understand each other? That’s actually the basis of their relationship.

Was it a conscious decision to cast Tsutomu Yamazaki, star of the classic ramen movie “Tampopo”?

Absolutely. “Tampopo” is one of my favorite movies. The casting of Yamazaki was really deliberate, to have the car door open and out walks the guy from “Tampopo.”

A lot of people are comparing your film with “Lost in Translation” . . .

I would rather not be compared to “Lost in Translation.” I thought that the depiction of the Japanese characters was very stereotypical and kind of racist. I also thought that it had nothing to do with Japan; they could have been on the moon, and the only reason to have Japanese people was to make fun of them.

What is your favorite style of ramen?

Oh! Pork ramen. I can’t think of the word anymore . . . (A staff member reminds him: tonkotsu.)

Yeah, the lake house too,..the funny thing is i had to do a presentation in my Media and visual studies class and i made it about hollywood remakes/cultural imperialism etc, and the majority of the caucasians in the room got so DEFENSIVE, hahaha, even my class tutor, lol, only a few people got what i was getting at….although to be fair, mosty of those guys were minorities…..

she’s hot in the crackhead sorta way.

And smacker, I’ll give you all those movie remakes, and throw in The Lake House/Il Mare, but you have to admit that Infernal Affair’s American remake was good on its own terms, minus the Mark Walhberg movie save at the end!?

it doesn’t matter that you’ve been making ramen since lo mein, brittany murphy can do it better. why? because she’s white, and white people can do everything better.