Can women and foreigners help drive a ramen renaissance to keep Japan's noodle shops on the boil?

Tokyo — Japan's ubiquitous ramen shops have long served that most-proletarian of dishes at no-frills counters, where customers unceremoniously slurp and gulp their way through boiling-hot bowls of noodles. 

But while the ramen joints were long an almost exclusively male domain, the cement-floored greasy spoons of yore are giving way to hip décor, handcrafted crockery, and — hang onto your chopsticks — fusion flavors. And women are lining up.