The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice

by Trevor Corson

  Fie was a Danish supermodel and movie star. Or rather, Fie was not a Danish supermodel and movie star. She had cut short her film career and turned down offers from modeling agencies, and had come to L.A. to pursue her dream of becoming a sushi chef. She had graduated from the California Sushi Academy in March and was now a chef in training.

  After the chefs had reviewed the night’s specials, Toshi took over.

  “All right!” he bellowed in Japanese, his face stern. “You’re all going to work hard tonight!” He looked around the room. “Got it?”

  There were nods, a few sharp utterances of “Hai!”

  The restaurant manager shouted out the universal welcome. “Irasshaimase!”

  The staff yelled back in unison, “Irasshaimase!”

  The chefs and waitresses dispersed, and the manager propped the front door open for business.

  For two decades, Toshi’s restaurant in Venice Beach had been packed every night of the week. Movie stars had stopped in for dinner all the time, and they treated him like a buddy. Now, in Hermosa Beach, Toshi’s fortunes had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Every day there seemed to be fewer customers, and the restaurant was hemorrhaging money.

  Toshi stared out the open door, his face impassive.

  7

  L.A. STORY

  The first Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles opened about 1855, in the neighborhood that would become Little Tokyo. By the early 1900s, Little Tokyo bustled with shoppers, who patronized a number of Japanese food establishments.

  But few of America’s Japanese immigrants ate in Japanese restaurants. By 1910, more than 40,000 Japanese migrant laborers were toiling on American farms, along with another 10,000 on railroads and several thousand more in canneries. The farm workers often survived by drinking the water in the irrigation ditches and eating the grapes and strawberries in the fields, perhaps supplemented by a dinner of flour dumplings in salt soup if they were lucky. The closest the railroad workers got to fine dining was a monthly visit to town to buy a bottle of bourbon, a can of salmon, and some rice. Nostalgic for home, they’d squeeze together what they considered “extravagant” rice balls and cover them with slices of fish.

  By 1940, Japanese immigrant farmers were growing 95 percent of California’s snap beans and celery, nearly 70 percent of its tomatoes, and around 40 percent of its onions and green peas. They owned many of the produce stalls in L.A.’s city market.

  But discrimination against the Japanese made it difficult for them to enter other businesses. One option was importing Japanese foodstuffs and selling them to other Japanese in the United States. People called this the “homesickness trade.” In L.A., a group of these importers formed an organization called the Mutual Trading Company.

  Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor interrupted the homesickness trade. The U.S. government locked up Japanese Americans in internment camps. A group of Catholic nuns in downtown L.A. protected the Mutual Trading Company’s warehouse stock until the end of the war.

  After the war, a man named Noritoshi Kanai joined Mutual Trading and decided that to survive as a business, the company would have to sell products that average Americans would buy.

  In the early 1960s, Kanai traveled back and forth between Japan and America in search of products to sell to Americans. He tried importing canned snake meat, chocolate-covered ants, and a type of biscuit. The last went over well, but was immediately imitated. On one of his trips to Japan, Kanai took along an American business partner named Harry Wolf. After an unsuccessful day of scouting, Kanai was hungry for a meal at a traditional sushi bar. Wolf tagged along.

  Wolf told Kanai he’d never experienced anything so delicious. Every day for the next week, Wolf returned to the same sushi bar. For Kanai, it was an epiphany. He decided to make “the East Asian food that most disgusted white people,” as he put it later, the core of his new business.

  Back in L.A., Kanai did everything in his power to launch proper, Tokyo-style nigiri sushi in the United States. He partnered with a Japanese restaurant in Little Tokyo called Kawafuku and brought an authentic sushi chef and his wife from Japan to America. They opened a sushi bar inside Kawafuku in 1966.

  Acquiring the fresh seafood specific to sushi was a problem. At the time, the idea of flying in fish packed in ice on airplanes was considered ludicrous because the cost was so exorbitant. But Kanai ordered fresh seafood from Tokyo anyway. Hearing that fishmongers in Boston were throwing away the fatty belly meat of tuna, he boarded a plane for the East Coast and arranged to buy the bellies. When he learned that good sea urchins lived in the waters near L.A., he hired a diver to harvest them.

  The sushi bar at Kawafuku prospered. Another sushi bar opened in Little Tokyo in a restaurant called Eigiku. Yet another opened down the street in a fancy restaurant called Tokyo Kaikan, which had been built in the style of a traditional Japanese inn.

  But the customers at the new sushi bars were Japanese—mostly businessmen and expatriates. Kanai had succeeded in launching sushi, but he had failed to sell it to Americans.

  Then two things happened.

  The Japanese businessmen introduced their American colleagues to the sushi bar. Eating sushi quickly became an exciting novelty and a badge of courage for these Americans.

  And, after a few years, the first sushi chef at Kawafuku returned to Japan and opened a lavish sushi bar in the Ginza in Tokyo. Word spread that he’d made a fortune in L.A. Young sushi chefs frustrated by long apprenticeships and rigid hierarchies in Japan had a new option—America.

  But in L.A., sushi was still confined to Little Tokyo. The first sushi bar outside Little Tokyo opened in 1970, in L.A.’s Century City near Beverly Hills. Its target wasn’t ordinary Americans. It was Hollywood stars.

  The sushi bar was called Osho, and it was located next to the Twentieth Century Fox movie studio. The actor Yul Brynner became a lunchtime regular, and the transformation of sushi into an American meal began in earnest.

  Over the next few years Hollywood embraced sushi. It was an exotic meal. Sushi’s new customers had a lot to learn. Many of them were surprised to discover that tuna meat was red, not white, as it came in the can.

  Sushi arrived in New York City and Chicago, too. In New York, a Japanese restaurant called Nippon began serving raw fish; and in 1975, the city’s first full-fledged sushi restaurant, Takezushi, opened for business. In Chicago, a restaurant called Kamehachi opened in 1967 and began serving sushi. The restaurant was across the street from The Second City comedy club, and a performer named John Belushi was a regular customer. A few years later Belushi was in New York, playing a Japanese samurai deli chef on Saturday Night Live.

  In response to the new interest in sushi, a wave of Japanese men arrived in Los Angeles and opened so many sushi bars that Wilshire Boulevard in West L.A. earned the nickname “Sushi Row.” Kanai’s vision had become reality. His Mutual Trading Company finally prospered as it became the primary sushi restaurant supplier in the United States.

  The timing was fortuitous. In 1977, the U.S. Senate issued a report called Dietary Goals for the United States, that blamed fatty, high-cholesterol foods for the increasing incidence of disease. The report recommended greater consumption of fish and grains. Around the same time, health experts also began to promote the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, abundant in fish. Many Americans discovered sushi as a healthful alternative.

  In L.A., some of the Japanese men who arrived to open sushi restaurants were trained sushi chefs. Many were not. One of the untrained was the future executive chef of Hama Hermosa restaurant and CEO of the California Sushi Academy, Toshi Sugiura.

  Toshi had grown up in Japan in the seaside town of Hayama, just south of Tokyo, where fresh fish were abundant. His mother owned a small restaurant, but Toshi had shown no interest in the family business. By the age of 15, all he could think about was leaving Japan and traveling to Europe and America. When he failed the college entrance exams, he found his excuse.

  In the mid-1970s, Toshi hitch
hiked throughout Europe for three years, sometimes living on water and bananas. He was good with his hands, and he earned money practicing the art of kirie—elaborate paper cutout pictures. He’d walk door to door around dinnertime selling his cutouts. Often he’d receive a free bowl of food. In medieval Japan, it would have been the lifestyle of a wandering Buddhist monk. In Europe in the 1970s, Toshi called it the lifestyle of a hippie.

  In 1978, he borrowed $400 for a ticket to Los Angeles. When he arrived, he asked an acquaintance what was trendy in L.A. His friend said sushi. Toshi figured since he was good with his hands, he could make sushi, even though he’d hardly ever eaten the stuff. Running a restaurant would be easy—if his mother had done it, so could he.

  Most of the new sushi bars in L.A. were traditional in style. But Toshi found a Jewish doctor who had just installed a sushi bar in his non-Japanese restaurant in Malibu. The first sushi chef to work there had quit. Toshi talked his way behind the sushi bar. He had no idea what he was doing. The restaurant was called Something’s Fishy.

  Toshi quickly taught himself the bare basics: he mixed sweet vinegar with rice, squeezed it into rectangles, and topped it with slices of fish. Whenever he could get away, Toshi visited the sushi bar of a traditionally trained Japanese chef in L.A. named Katsu Michite. Katsu was becoming one of the most respected sushi chefs on the West Coast. Toshi would sit at Katsu’s sushi bar, order food, and memorize every move the elder chef made. Soon Toshi was spending a third of his salary on sushi at Katsu’s bar. Everything he saw Katsu do, he would return to Something’s Fishy and imitate.

  What Toshi lacked in experience he made up for with charisma. Malibu in 1978 was crazy. Americans would sit at Toshi’s bar, and he would joke and drink with them while he served them sushi, and pretty soon the sushi bar turned into a wild party. Toshi laughed, screamed, and got hammered right along with his customers.

  Toshi had no idea who these people were. He just knew they were fun. He gradually learned their names. There was one pretty customer named Olivia Newton-John. There was a guy named Robin Williams, one named Neil Diamond, and some lady named Linda Ronstadt. One night Toshi was serving Barbra Streisand sushi. She asked Toshi if he knew who she was. ‘No idea!’ he yelled, moving on to the next customer. He’d been hitchhiking across Europe making paper cutouts and eating bananas, and before that he’d been a kid in Japan. Hollywood might as well have been on another planet.

  After a year, Toshi was hired away from Something’s Fishy to run a place in Venice Beach called Hama Venice—the word hama means “beach” in Japanese. Venice Beach was an edgy town, full of artists, hippies, and film and music industry types who wanted something gritty and authentic. And like Malibu, it was wild.

  At Hama Venice, Toshi was able to define the style of the restaurant from the start. Most Japanese chefs filled their restaurants with shoji screens and quiet shamisen music. Toshi blared rock ’n’ roll and acted crazy behind the sushi bar. Customers loved it. The priesthood of Japanese sushi chefs in L.A. hated it.

  But Toshi wasn’t simply a rebel. From watching Katsu, Toshi had learned to be a stickler for cleanliness and quality. At his new restaurant, he insisted on strict hygiene and high-quality ingredients and fish.

  More important, Toshi served traditional Japanese sushi, but not in a traditional style. He had no problem serving his customers bland, American-style sushi: rolls filled with salmon and cream cheese, “burrito” rolls, and the like. But he also made them weird, exotic, Japanese sushi, whether they ordered it or not.

  First, he would serve them what they’d ordered; then, he’d start handing them nigiri topped with bizarre fish and the sex organs of sea urchins. He’d pour them more beer or sake and yell at them—‘Just eat it!’—until they swallowed the stuff. If they liked it, he’d give them more. If they didn’t, he’d try something else on them. ‘Just eat it!’ He was like a Nike commercial, for sushi.

  Toshi’s restaurant was both wildly exotic and utterly approachable. It was a formula for success. The restaurant was packed every night. Celebrities came—old friends from Something’s Fishy, then Tom Hanks, Brooke Shields, and others. Hama Venice became one of the go-to sushi spots in L.A.

  In 1980, NBC aired a TV miniseries based on James Clavell’s novel Shgun. Richard Chamberlain played a British ship captain who arrives in Japan around 1600 and learns the ways of the samurai. Shgun was one of the highest-rated programs in NBC’s history. It sparked a nationwide interest in all things Japanese, including sushi.

  The owner of Hama Venice retired in 1983 and sold the restaurant to Toshi. He acquired other restaurants. In 1989, Toshi married a Japanese woman who was a fashion consultant to Japanese celebrities. They had a daughter and then a son. They bought a BMW, a Mercedes, and a condo with a view of Marina del Rey.

  The world of sushi was changing. By the 1990s, sushi restaurants were everywhere. At Hama Venice, most of the celebrities stopped coming. Still, Toshi’s business continued at a brisk pace and he never ceased his antics behind the bar, carousing with his customers. Many mornings he woke with a hangover. Some nights he stumbled home and fell asleep on the carpet. His wife worried about him.

  In 2003, Toshi’s world crashed down around him. He’d been having too much fun to pay much attention to business management. He was cited for twenty-four years of tax evasion. Toshi’s bank accounts were stripped bare and Hama Venice was put up for sale. Unlike citizens in Japan in AD 718, Toshi could not use sushi to pay his taxes.

  In Hermosa Beach, a few miles from Venice, a friend of Toshi’s owned a restaurant called California Beach. Once a legend, it had lost ground to an invasion of cheap, generic sushi places. The owner wanted to relaunch the restaurant with a new look. Hama Hermosa was born.

  Building a new clientele for the new restaurant from scratch was difficult and competition was stiff. Toshi was still responsible for the fate of several other restaurants and a small army of chefs and staff, not to mention his wife, 14-year-old daughter, and 13-year-old son. As soon as he put money in the bank, the authorities removed it to pay off his debt. The stresses mounted.

  In April 2005, on a Friday night during dinner service, Toshi was slicing scallops behind the sushi bar when he put down his knife. He couldn’t move or speak properly. He nearly collapsed, but steadied himself. He rested for a few minutes, then forced himself to keep making sushi, until his customers had all gone home. He tried to work in his office the next day, but gave up. Finally he saw a doctor. He’d had a stroke.

  Toshi gradually improved, and soon he was back at work. He was lucky to be functioning at all. But try as he might, most of his energy and charisma had deserted him. For Toshi, that was like losing his soul.

  Hama Hermosa started losing customers, and now it was losing money.

  The one bright spot was the academy. Toshi loved seeing new students arrive to begin their training. The beginning of a semester always held a sense of anticipation and possibility.

  This was the academy’s thirtieth class, and he’d already grown fond of the students. Most of them would do well, he thought. But he was worried about Kate. It was obvious that she lacked confidence. A number of women had come through his sushi academy, and the ones who’d succeeded were the ones who’d believed in themselves. Given the challenges that female sushi chefs faced, if Kate was going to survive in the world of sushi, somehow she’d have to find confidence.

  8

  BATTLE OF THE SEXES

  In Japan, a popular comic book series called Sushi Chef Kirara’s Job tells the fictional tale of a young female sushi chef. Kirara’s father deserts her mother, and her mother dies when Kirara is young. A kindly old sushi chef of great fame adopts Kirara and raises her in his small neighborhood sushi shop. When the old chef gets sick, he must close the shop. Out of love for the old man, Kirara decides to reopen his famous shop herself.

  The old man is the last chef to have been taught the secret techniques of the most renowned sushi establishment of old Tokyo. Kirara is h
is only protege, and she struggles to keep the lineage alive. To prove that his old style of traditional sushi is still the best, Kirara goes on a television show called Sushi Battle 21, in which sushi chefs compete for the title of national champion.

  Kirara is a skinny girl with a pretty face. The male sushi chefs are muscle-bound athletes. They practice sushi making as if it were a martial art, and challenge each other to duels of skill and endurance, like samurai defending their honor. Kirara’s chief rival, a man named Sakamaki, pumps iron at the gym as part of his sushi training.

  Prior to the battle, Sakamaki visits Kirara’s little shop and orders sushi at the bar. While waiting for his food he lights a cigarette. When the sushi comes, he taps his cigarette ash onto the fish. “You don’t understand this world,” Sakamaki growls at Kirara, “because you are a woman.”

  Later, Kirara meets the only other woman chef in the contest. The woman is a hardened veteran. She tells Kirara she has suffered all manner of discrimination and humiliation, from both customers and other chefs. To survive, she has cut her hair short and obliterated any hint of femininity in her appearance and personality. “I have become both physically and mentally a man,” she says.

  The comic book tale isn’t far from the truth. In real-life Japan, sushi is a man’s world. Male chefs use all manner of excuses to defend their sushi bars against women who want to work there. Women can’t be sushi chefs, they say, because makeup, body lotion, and perfume destroy the flavor of the fish and rice. Some male chefs claim that the area behind the sushi bar is sacred space and would be defiled by the presence of a woman. Others say women don’t have the reflexes necessary for the knife work. Until 1999, Japan had a law prohibiting women from working later than 10:00 p.m. at any job, which made employment at most sushi bars impossible. A writer in Tokyo asked her friends if they would eat sushi made by a female chef, and even the women said no.