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

by Trevor Corson

  The most common argument against female sushi chefs is that a woman’s hands are warmer than a man’s. A woman chef, people claim, will cook the raw fish simply by handling it. In fact, a study published in The Lancet in 1998 demonstrated that women are likely to have colder hands than men.

  Sushi is a man’s world on the customer side of the sushi bar, too. At a traditional, high-end sushi bar in Japan, a Japanese woman who walks in to eat by herself is likely to feel just as intimidated and unwelcome as an American tourist. In the mid-1990s, Reiko Yuyama, a Japanese publishing executive, stopped by a famous sushi bar for a meal. She was alone. Most of the other customers were men. The chef chatted amiably with the other customers but ignored Yuyama. She managed to order several pieces of sushi, but after only her fourth piece a cup of green tea appeared in front of her. Since green tea is often served at the end of the meal, she took this as a request that she leave. She stayed for an hour, continuing to order. When she asked for the bill, it was obviously for more than she’d been served.

  Spurred by this incident, Yuyama visited many of the best sushi bars in Tokyo and around Japan, always alone, and described her experiences in a book called One Woman Sushi. Traditional sushi bars are like exclusive clubs, Yuyama found—difficult for single women and the uninitiated to enter, especially since there are no menus.

  The other women Yuyama encountered in the sushi bars were almost always accompanied by men, and the men used the opportunity to impress their dates with ostentatious displays of sushi knowledge. She watched the women play along, deferring to the men in everything from ordering to eating techniques. When Yuyama ordered sushi herself, the other women glared at her. Yuyama concluded that traditional sushi bars are the last place in Japan where men still feel completely superior to women.

  The invention and spread of “conveyor-belt sushi,” or kaitenzushi, has helped democratize low-end sushi in Japan. Small plates of sushi ride around on a conveyor belt and the customer picks whichever he or she wants to try. Interaction with the chef is eliminated. In a survey, Japanese housewives said that while they were intimidated by the price and formality of traditional sushi bars, they frequented conveyor-belt sushi restaurants.

  By the end of the 1990s, revenue at traditional sushi bars in Japan had declined, while revenue at conveyor-belt sushi restaurants had increased. Afraid of losing more business, some traditional sushi bars have become more open to women dining on their own.

  In recent years in Japan, another new style of sushi bar has appeared as well. Inspired by the popularity of sushi in America and Europe, as well as by the culture of women’s rights in the West, these new sushi bars have Western-style interiors, play jazz over the sound system, and sometimes have televisions displaying international news. The sushi they serve borrows many ingredients from Western cuisine. Young women dining on their own or with other young women are their best customers.

  Despite the obstacles facing female sushi chefs, in recent years women in Japan have, like Kirara of the comic book, gradually fought their way into jobs behind the sushi bar. But many Japanese women trying to become sushi chefs simply leave Japan for America.

  As sushi restaurants proliferated in the United States, Toshi watched standards of quality and hygiene deteriorate. A traditional apprenticeship required at least five years to complete, and demand for chefs in the United States had outstripped supply. Like Toshi, many chefs were jumping into the business with little or no training. Toshi worried that sooner or later someone would die after consuming improperly prepared sushi. Opening the academy was his attempt to prevent that, and to help people like him—chefs who hadn’t completed a traditional apprenticeship—learn proper technique.

  Toshi expected most of the students to be Asian. To his surprise, a majority of the applicants were American, and some were women. One of the first women to attend the California Sushi Academy was the actress Tracy Griffith, half-sister of Melanie Griffith. A feisty redhead, Tracy had gotten to the point in her film career where she no longer wanted to wear the things the directors wanted her to wear or say the things they wanted her to say. She saw an ad in Gourmet magazine for the sushi academy.

  At the age of 12, Tracy had accompanied Melanie to the sushi bar in Malibu called Something’s Fishy, where Toshi would begin his career. Tracy had fallen in love with sushi. She loved to cook, and at the age of 18 she worked as a private chef. She signed up to attend the sushi academy.

  Within five minutes of Tracy’s arrival, the Japanese instructor at Toshi’s new academy started yelling at her.

  ‘You should not be here!’ he screamed. He glared at her fingernail polish and her long red hair. ‘You unnatural! No such thing sushi woman!’

  He spent the rest of the class trying to intimidate Tracy into quitting. When she returned for the next class he was irate.

  ‘What did I say?!’ he screamed. ‘What are doing here? You should not be here!’

  Tracy complained to Toshi. The things the instructor was saying were illegal in America. Toshi shrugged and said there was nothing he could do—the instructor was a typical Japanese sushi chef; that’s the way they were. Tracy would just have to deal with it.

  Nearly every day, the man yelled at her. ‘You should not be here!’ He told Tracy that his reputation would be ruined if anyone found out he was teaching a woman. He brought her to tears regularly. But she kept coming to class, and she learned a lot from him.

  After graduation, Tracy walked into one Beverly Hills sushi restaurant after another, asking for a job. Everyone laughed at her. ‘There is no such thing,’ they said. ‘Get out!’

  Tracy heard from a friend about a new Asian-themed nightclub about to open in Beverly Hills, called Tsunami. It would have a sushi bar. But it wasn’t a Japanese-run operation. The man in charge was Mark Fleischman, a slick nightclub owner who had run Studio 54 in New York. Tracy arranged a meeting with Fleischman. He looked her up and down.

  ‘So, you want to be a sushi chef,’ he said. ‘Okay, that’s going to be great. We’ll put you in a little number, put you by the window. See this hot chick with the knife?’

  ‘No, no,’ Tracy said, ‘I’m a real sushi chef.’ She had left acting to escape all that.

  But competition was stiff and gimmicks were in vogue—tap-dancing sushi chefs, chefs who sang cabaret and performed line dances behind the sushi bar, even sushi served atop naked women.

  A week later Fleischman introduced Tracy to the Japanese chef he’d hired. The Japanese chef looked at Tracy, then at Fleischman.

  ‘What do you mean she’s going to work here?’

  ‘Yes,’ Fleischman said, ‘she’s going to work with you. She’s going to be our star!’

  ‘I quit,’ the chef said. He walked out.

  Fleischman talked him into staying.

  Tracy had a conversation with the chef. ‘I don’t know what the hell is with this female sushi chef thing,’ Tracy said, ‘but if I’m horrible and you can’t deal with me in a month, I’ll leave.’

  He glared her. ‘Okay.’

  When Tsunami opened for business, Tracy refused to wear the suggestive outfit that Fleischman wanted her to wear. That didn’t stop Fleischman from stirring up a media frenzy.

  ‘We have the only female sushi chef in the world!’ she remembers him saying, as news reporters snapped her picture. The Japanese chef stood aside and glowered.

  Every night the club was packed. Tracy made sushi like a mad-woman. At first she asked the Japanese chef questions, but he told her to shut up and just watch him. So she did—for a year. And she learned a lot. Tracy went on to run her own sushi bar, at a restaurant called Rika’s on the Sunset Strip, and publish her own sushi cookbook.

  Other women graduated from the California Sushi Academy and went on to successful careers in sushi. A Venice Beach native named Nikki Gilbert lived in Japan and returned to L.A. to found a sushi catering and teaching company called Sushi Girl. A tough Israeli named Tali Sever endured discrimination during a short sushi
apprenticeship in Japan, then returned to L.A. and helped develop an American-style sushi cafe—a sort of Starbucks of sushi—called Sushi Central. An African-American woman named Marisa Baggett graduated and became head chef of a sushi bar called Do in Memphis, Tennessee.

  Then, in January 2005, a woman arrived at the academy unlike any Toshi or his chefs had ever encountered.

  Fie Kruse was one of the most beautiful women Toshi and his chefs had ever met, and her beauty could not have been more un-Japanese. She was Danish—shapely and tall, with large blue eyes and shockingly blond hair. And yet she seemed to act entirely Japanese. Fie was sweet, soft-spoken, and deferential. The Japanese chefs didn’t know what to make of her. Most of them simply fell in love.

  In Denmark, Fie had performed her first major film role by the age of 13, and at 16 she’d been recruited by four different modeling agencies. But Fie chose to work in her stepfather’s takeout sushi shop.

  During the Japanese economic bubble of the 1980s, Japanese restaurants had proliferated in Europe. In Paris, for example, Japanese businessmen took their French counterparts out for sushi, and the meal developed a following. In 1984, even conveyor-belt sushi appeared in Paris.

  When Japan’s bubble burst, many of these restaurants closed. But in 1991 in London, a sushi chef opened a takeout counter called Noto Sushi. It quickly caught the attention of Harrods department store. Harrods began selling Noto Sushi takeout boxes in 1993, and installed a Noto Sushi counter in the store the next year. In the ensuing years, sushi spread throughout Europe’s most cosmopolitan cities. Conveyor-belt sushi restaurants were especially popular.

  Fie’s stepfather traveled frequently and saw sushi everywhere. He opened the first sushi shop in Fie’s hometown of Aarhus, in Denmark. Fie worked there throughout her high school years. The shop was full of books on Japanese culture, food, and Buddhism, and Fie read voraciously. She took a class on Asian religion.

  At 19 she traveled to Asia and ate her way across Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia. She returned to Europe, attended cooking school in Denmark, and saved her money. In Europe, sushi continued to soar in popularity. When Fie felt ready, she flew 5,600 miles to L.A. and spent her savings at the California Sushi Academy.

  She quickly attracted attention in Hermosa Beach. Luke Walton, forward for the L.A. Lakers—and son of the NBA’s great Bill Walton—saw her at a yoga class and asked her out. She turned him down.

  After Fie graduated, Toshi let her stay and continue her training behind the sushi bar at Hama Hermosa. Fie had a different problem from the women who’d preceded her. The Japanese chefs bent over backwards to compliment her and help her out. Customers adored her. Sometimes Fie couldn’t tell if the sushi she was making was good, or if everyone was just being nice to her because she was beautiful.

  The night before the party at Paramount Pictures, a bigmouthed Caucasian man came to Hama Hermosa for dinner. He sat at the bar, near Fie, and drank sake and ate. One of the staff asked the man how he’d liked his meal.

  “Well, actually,” he boomed, drowning out the music on the sound system, “I don’t like women chefs. I want a Japanese man to serve my sushi.”

  It was just as well that Kate hadn’t been hanging around the restaurant that night. She was having enough trouble in class, feeling like the flaky girl who couldn’t do anything right. She’d always been a tomboy, but at sushi school her male classmates were leaving her way behind. Zoran was still babying her. It had become clear that he held her to a lower standard than the rest of the class.

  To keep up her spirits, Kate had been doodling love hearts in her notebook. Zoran saw them and laughed at her.

  9

  HOLLYWOOD SHOWDOWN

  On the morning of the Hollywood party at Paramount Pictures, Toshi arrived at the restaurant well ahead of his staff. By 10:00 a.m. he was hard at work in the kitchen. The party would begin in eight hours.

  Toshi stood at a stainless-steel table that would look at home in a morgue. The table was 12 feet long and ran diagonally across the kitchen. On its surface was a cutting board of high-density polyethylene, chemically fused to repel bacteria, fat, and blood, but soft enough that Toshi could wield his high-carbon blade for several hours without dulling its razor-sharp edge.

  Toshi bent over a big block of blood-red flesh. When sushi first became popular in the early 1800s, a high-class chef like Toshi would have been run out of town for serving tuna. The bloody meat of fresh tuna and other red-fleshed fish spoils easily and the Japanese considered it smelly. The fatty belly meat of the tuna was especially despised.

  But with the advent of refrigeration, the fish could be kept fresh, and in the years after World War II the Japanese learned from Americans to love red meat, including tuna.

  Takumi, the Japanese student, stood across the table and watched. On his cutting board sat a similar but smaller slab of tuna.

  Toshi carved through the block of flesh like a sculptor, scrutinizing the muscle, turning and trimming. He tossed scraps into a bowl.

  “We’ll use these for spicy tuna,” he said. He was speaking Japanese, but the words “spicy tuna” were in English. There isn’t even a name for it in Japanese. In the early days of American sushi, Japanese chefs in L.A. had realized they could take the worst parts of the fish—the fibrous scraps, the flesh left on the skin, and meat past its prime—and chop them up with chili sauce. The taste of the fish was lost, but Americans loved it.

  “The Mexican influence here is strong,” Toshi told Takumi. “Americans like spicy food more than Japanese people do.”

  Takumi nodded. In a few minutes, he would scrape shreds of meat off the skin with a spoon, chop them up with other scraps, and squirt the mixture full of hot sauce. But now he tried his hand at trimming his slab of tuna. When he started to cut, Toshi stopped him.

  “No, not like that. You’re cutting in the same direction as the fiber.” With his finger Toshi traced the parallel lines of connective tissue that ran through the tuna’s flesh like the grain in a piece of wood. “See? You’ve got to cut against the fiber.” Toshi flipped the slab of meat over so Takumi could slice into it from the other side. “Cut them thinner than you would for the restaurant,” he added. “For a catering job like this, we go for volume.”

  Other restaurant staff trickled in to help prepare for the party. Toshi’s office assistant dumped a 2-pound bag of bright green powder labeled “wasabi” into a mixing bowl. Like most wasabi served in restaurants, there wasn’t a shred of wasabi in it. Real wasabi is a rare plant that is notoriously difficult to grow and tastes quite different. This was a mix of horseradish and mustard powder. She added water and stirred. The powder jelled into a green blob, which emitted fumes. Toshi wheezed.

  “Get the hell out of the kitchen with that thing!” he bellowed. “It’s going to drive us all crazy.”

  The woman bowed, hugged the bowl to her chest, and left, her eyes watering.

  Soon Kate and the other students trickled in and loaded the catering equipment into a rented truck. Jay shouted out instructions.

  “Bring a minimal amount of stuff with you!” Jay said. “Do not bring big bags! Otherwise, you’re not going to get through security!”

  But, of course, they took their knives.

  The students would ride in the restaurant’s old van. Kate hopped into the front passenger seat and pulled the door shut with a bang. They cruised down the freeway. In the distance the glass towers of downtown L.A. rose through the haze. Soon they were driving straight toward the gigantic white “HOLLYWOOD” letters on the hill. They pulled alongside a vast, high-walled compound. Security cameras monitored the van’s arrival.

  At the security checkpoint there were men with guns—big guns. Some rested Winchester rifles on their shoulders. Others carried six-shooters on their hips. Most of them wore ten-gallon hats and chaps. They were actors. The real guards wore windbreakers and carried walkie-talkies. The actors passed their guns to the guards and walked through the metal detector. When the guards s
aw Kate’s chef’s jacket, they found her name on a list and waved her through, along with her case of knives.

  Inside the compound Kate followed her classmates past a row of hangars and emerged onto the edge of an American frontier town of a hundred years ago, bustling with inhabitants of the Old West. The sushi students wandered into the town like a gang of lost samurai. Around them cowboys twirled lassos. The smell of grilled beef swirled through the streets.

  The town continued for blocks. In the distance a pointy white water tower perched on stilts. Painted on its side was a snowy mountain under the word “Paramount.” Kate shambled through the streets clutching her knife case. Ahead she saw Toshi and some of the staff setting up their sushi stall on a street corner.

  More than sixty restaurants would be hawking food from colorful stalls, most of it seared or baked or fried, all of it smelling delicious. Some of those restaurants were legends. Pink’s and its “famous hot dogs” had started in the 1930s. The stall neighboring the sushi stall was belching smoke. It was called “The Pig.” When Toshi found a chance to slip away for a few minutes, he’d make a beeline for Lawry’s roast beef.

  Now he buttoned up his chef’s jacket and surveyed the equipment—the 25-gallon coolers filled with fish, the insulated containers of rice, the cases of knives, the soy-sauce bottles, the blocks of disposable chopsticks.

  Then he surveyed the students. Some were helping set up, but others stood around, not sure what to do. His eye lingered on Kate.

  “We need backup,” he said to himself.

  Toshi rooted in the pile of equipment for his secret weapon: the Suzumo SSG-GTO. He located the black padded case and carried it to the back of the stall.

  The Suzumo SSG-GTO looked like a wooden tub with a lid. Sushi chefs had been keeping rice in wooden tubs for nearly 200 years. This tub was different. Toshi tugged an electrical cord out of the back and searched for an outlet. He froze. This was the Old West. There were no outlets.