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

by Trevor Corson

  Toshi scowled and scanned the street for a grip. He’d been around Hollywood long enough to know that anywhere movies were made there was electricity. You just needed a grip to show you where it was. He spotted a man bristling with tools, gadgets, and brackets hanging off belts. Toshi dragged the fellow over to the sushi stall. The grip knelt and unscrewed a steel plate in the ground. Inside was an array of heavy-duty sockets. Toshi powered up the GTO.

  Like the town around him, the wood on Toshi’s wooden tub was fake. He lifted off the plastic lid and dumped in cooked rice. He pressed a button. A drawer slid out. He typed instructions on a keypad and the GTO hummed to life.

  Toshi’s wife and children had arrived. His son Daisuke rushed over to the GTO. The Japanese student, Takumi, joined them and the three of them leaned over the machine, hands on their knees, and peered inside.

  Like the robots that build cars in the factories of Toyota and Honda, sushi-making robots have become commonplace in Japan, laboring tirelessly behind the scenes at mass-market sushi establishments. In Europe, owners of conveyor-belt sushi restaurants have been known to install elaborate, stainless-steel sushi robots in plain view, where customers admire their high-tech wizardry. But in the United States, sushi robots are a well-kept secret. Most restaurant owners keep them out of sight, and use them for takeout and delivery orders.

  Toshi pressed a button on the GTO. Gears clicked and motors whirred. The GTO could crank out professional-grade rectangles of pressed sushi rice at speeds approaching 1,800 per hour. But it jammed. Toshi cursed.

  “It’s not working!”

  Sushi as the world knows it today began with street stalls similar to Toshi’s, except without any robots.

  By the 1600s, people in the Japanese capital of Kyoto and the nearby city of Osaka were eating “quick sushi”—fish on vinegared rice. It looked quite different from today’s sushi. It was made by spreading vinegared rice in a box, laying whole fillets of fish on top, and compressing it with heavy stones for a few days. After pressing, it was cut into pieces like a cake.

  Around 1600, the new shogun moved the capital away from Kyoto, the seat of a thousand years of Japanese tradition and courtly culture, to a remote, unknown castle town called Edo. Edo meant “door to the bay,” and it sat directly on the edge of a vast ocean inlet. Edo would become the city of Tokyo.

  About fifty years after the move, a terrible fire destroyed most of the city. Workers swarmed into Edo to rebuild it. They needed something to eat, and a new kind of business sprang up: stands and shops selling quick meals on the street. Hot noodle soup was especially popular. Sushi might never have caught on, but in 1686, to prevent another fire, the authorities outlawed hot noodle stands during the busy dinner hours. As a result, stands switched to serving “quick sushi,” which didn’t require heat.

  Edo grew rapidly. Regional lords set up part-time residences in the new capital and brought along their retinues of warriors and servants. By the second half of the 1700s, Edo had become the largest city in the world, a bustling metropolis crawling with samurai, construction workers, craftsmen, and merchants. Many of them lived in the provinces but stayed in Edo for extended periods on business, so an entire industry of food stalls and restaurants was created to serve them. Throughout this period, street stands selling sushi were the McDonald’s drive-thrus of old Tokyo. Modern sushi began as fast food.

  But “quick sushi” still wasn’t fast enough. The cakes of fish and rice had to be pressed together beforehand with heavy stones. Around 1818, some sushi chef came up with the idea of using his hands to squeeze each piece as it was ordered. The hand-squeezed pieces of sushi were called nigiri, from the Japanese verb nigiru, “to grasp” or “squeeze.”

  A sushi shop owner named Yohei Hanaya is usually credited with inventing nigiri. But historians think that when Hanaya opened his shop in 1810 he was still selling the old “quick sushi.” What Hanaya did, it seems, was bring the marketing skills of an entrepreneur to the new product. A poem from the time gives an indication of his success:

  Crowded together, weary with waiting

  Customers squeeze their hands

  As Yohei squeezes sushi.

  Hand-squeezed sushi was the hot new trend, and it spread throughout Edo. Soon men sold nigiri on street corners from portable stalls. It was more of a snack than a meal, and the situation was the reverse of today’s sushi bars: the vendor sat behind his wheeled cart and squeezed together nigiri while his customers stood and ate. Some vendors walked around town selling sushi out of boxes on their backs. Nigiri were especially popular among idle samurai on their way home after an evening at the bathhouse, and takeout boxes of nigiri became a popular snack at the theater.

  At the street stalls, people ate with their fingers. Some vendors nailed sheets of newspaper on a pole for customers to wipe their hands after eating. Fancier stalls hung a strip of cloth across the front of the stand. Sushi bars today still hang a sectioned piece of cloth across their entrances, but these have lost their utility—in nineteenth-century Tokyo, a person could judge the popularity of a sushi vendor by how dirty his cloth was. Meanwhile, at the theater, people acted more civilized, eating their nigiri by spearing them with long toothpicks.

  As the new style of sushi took root, people began to identify it by the name Edomae-zushi, to distinguish it from older styles in other regions. The word Edomae literally means “in front of Edo.” Eel sellers first used the term to advertise their eels as having been caught in the rivers that ran through the city. When sushi sellers adopted the term, it probably referred to the bay in front of the city, where most of their sushi toppings were harvested.

  Since nigiri was a street food, the toppings were modest. Boiled clam, abalone, and saltwater eel were common, as were small, light-fleshed fish that could be caught in the bay. The most delicious fish for sushi was considered to be kohada, which in English has the unappetizing name gizzard shad. Another popular topping—one that would make most sushi-goers nowadays gag—was shirauo, or whitebait. It had been a favorite of the shogun Ieyasu Tokugawa, who conquered and unified all of Japan in 1600. Sushi aficionados today still sometimes eat these tiny, translucent, wormlike fish, in bundles atop rectangles of rice.

  When nigiri sushi was invented, the Japanese considered tuna such a low-class fish that not even street vendors would touch it. Around 1840, fishermen in the region hauled in a bumper catch of tuna. With so much of the fish available, a sushi stall owner marinated some of it in soy sauce and talked his customers into trying it. Vendors began serving tuna on sushi rice, but only as cheap food for the proletariat. Most people, commoners and aristocrats alike, would continue to disdain tuna for many more decades.

  Nigiri might never have spread to the rest of Japan, and might never have become the form of sushi the world knows today, if it hadn’t been for two cataclysmic events. Beginning with the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and continuing on through World War II, much of the city of Edo—by then called Tokyo—was reduced to burnt ruins yet again. Sushi chefs left the city in droves. Most returned to their hometowns and opened Edomae-zushi shops in the provinces, serving nigiri.

  As the war dragged on, food became scarce. The military authorities imposed strict rationing on rice, and one by one the provincial sushi shops shut down. Even after the war, sushi shops could not acquire enough rice to do business. Seafood was strictly controlled as well. Edo-style sushi, it seemed, was dead.

  After the war, General Douglas MacArthur’s American occupation forces controlled the country. As part of the plan to revive Japan’s economy, the Americans wanted to restart the restaurant industry, but food was still rationed. They drew up regulations for what they called a “consignment processing system” and tested it in Tokyo.

  The system allowed customers to bring their own supply of rationed rice to a sushi shop and pay the chef to make it into sushi. To prevent foul play, the regulations were very specific. Because the predominant style of sushi in Tokyo was nigiri, the regulations spe
cified that a certain number of nigiri be made for a certain amount of rice.

  Many Tokyo sushi chefs were skeptical, but in trials the system proved popular with customers. Soon sushi shops were reopening and doing a brisk business. The police clamped down on shops that used rationed fish, so chefs had to be creative with their sushi toppings. Instead of the usual fish, they used mullet, toxic puffer fish, clams, and even snakehead—a fish capable of dragging itself onto land and living out of water for three or four days at a time, hence easy to keep fresh. For variety, or when they couldn’t get any seafood, the chefs used mushrooms, gourd shavings, and vegetables pickled in sake as sushi ingredients. Some of these ingredients have been used in sushi ever since.

  With the success of the “consignment processing system” in Tokyo, the Americans instituted the system nationwide. As a result, sushi shops throughout Japan were able to reopen for business much sooner than other restaurants, ensuring that sushi became ubiquitous in postwar Japan.

  Because the Americans had originally drafted the regulations for Tokyo, the consignment processing system continued to specify that chefs throughout the country make Tokyo-style nigiri rather than the other, local styles of sushi common in the provinces. Today, a great many regional varieties of sushi remain throughout Japan. But thanks to the American occupation forces, the Japanese meal that the world has come to know simply as “sushi” is Edomaezushi—the street-stall fast food of old Tokyo.

  At Paramount Pictures, the GTO robot was supposed to be cranking out Tokyo-style nigiri. Toshi jiggled the cutters. The robot didn’t budge.

  Toshi’s son spoke in English. “Dad, you should have tested it beforehand.” Daisuke’s name means “Big Help.”

  Toshi peered into the rice chamber. “Let’s take out the liner.”

  Takumi, eager to assist, grabbed the funnel-shaped insert and yanked it out, causing gobs of sticky rice to tumble into the machine’s gears. Toshi cleared out the gears and fiddled with the cutters. Suddenly the machine started up again, and out popped a perfect rectangle of rice.

  Toshi programmed the GTO for size and firmness. He plucked the first rectangle of rice from the bay. The machine ejected another one. Daisuke stuffed it in his mouth. The GTO produced another. Toshi nodded.

  “Yosh,” he said. The sushi robot was working.

  The late-afternoon sun beat down. Toshi wiped his brow and sat down with his wife in the shade at the back of the stall. He sank his teeth into a Krispy Kreme donut. Zoran sat nearby on a box, leaning against a wall, fast asleep.

  A cowboy sauntered past, spurs scraping the asphalt. He squinted at the sushi bar, then at Toshi.

  “What time do you guys kick into gear?” the cowboy asked.

  Toshi roused himself. “Five forty-five.”

  The cowboy nodded. “I’ll be here at five forty-four.”

  Later, after the cowboy had returned for sushi and strolled away satisfied, the town filled with tan and shiny Angelenos, and country-and-western bands played music. The line of people waiting for sushi snaked sideways down the street.

  Behind the sushi bar, three academy students squeezed together sloppy sushi as fast as they could. Zoran, who worked beside them, quickly produced sushi that was tight and neat. The mesmerized Angelenos crowded up to the bar and stared. They never got this close to the chefs at the sit-down sushi bars.

  Marcos Wisner was loving it. He’d come to the sushi academy at the age of 17, from Durango, Colorado—one of the youngest students ever to attend. He was a good-looking boy, tall, blond, and freckled. He thought of himself as a player. But he bumbled toward coolness in ways that weren’t always successful.

  Tonight Marcos liked having the tan and shiny Angelenos watch him. He figured it was a great way to meet hot girls. He’d just stand there behind the sushi bar, and they’d come to him—the sushi was bait. He’d worked in restaurants in Durango, but from behind the scenes in the kitchen he’d had few opportunities to meet hot girls. Plus, this was sushi—way cooler than regular food. Hot girls liked sushi.

  Two attractive young ladies stepped up to Marcos’s station.

  ‘Can I have a hand roll?’ one of them asked. He caught her smiling at him. She eyed him a few times while he worked, and he chatted with her. She devoured his roll, and gyrated to the music. Then she and her friend walked away.

  More cute girls asked Marcos for sushi.

  ‘Are you going to be around later?’ one of them asked.

  ‘Ah, I think I’m going to be stuck here until the sushi’s gone,’ Marcos said. He had just realized the problem.

  Kate hung back, watching, hands clasped behind her. She had plastered a brave smile on her face, but she hadn’t made any sushi yet, and it was nearly her turn to rotate in.

  Kate was not normally shy. She’d been in the limelight as a high-school soccer player. At Chuck E. Cheese, she’d been the only employee willing to climb into the mouse costume and perform for birthday parties. In fact, she’d nearly been fired for dancing the Robot in the mouse suit at a kid’s party. ‘Kate,’ the manager had scolded, ‘Chuck E. does not do the Robot.’ But Kate didn’t feel like dancing now.

  Takumi, the Japanese student, demonstrated a simple hand roll for her, in the shape of a waffle cone. He held the roll up and smiled reassuringly.

  Gunfire erupted in the street. The Angelenos spun and a few ducked for cover. A man on a second-story fire escape was squeezing off rounds. Someone returned fire from a window across the street. It was the sheriff, aiming his Winchester at the outlaw. The Angelenos laughed and turned back to their sushi. There were now more people in line for sushi than for any other food, except for Mr. Cecil’s California Ribs.

  Zoran stepped away from the sushi bar. Kate found herself in his place. She was now the lead sushi chef, the one the hungry Angelenos first encountered after their long wait in line. Toshi watched from the back of the stall.

  ‘Spicy tuna, please.’ The customers pressed in. ‘I’ll take salmon.’

  Kate had no time to think.

  ‘Can I have extra wasabi?’

  Her hands started to move.

  ‘What’s that fish there?’

  She wasn’t sure—albacore? yellowtail? It didn’t matter. She pressed rice and fish on seaweed, rolled, and handed it off.

  ‘Give me one of those shrimp—no, make it two.’

  There were several perfect rectangles of rice on a blue plastic plate at her hip. She grabbed one, laid the shrimp on top, and squeezed it into a nigiri in her fingers. She tried to look as if she knew what she was doing.

  The customers smiled. ‘Hey, thanks!’

  ‘Two tuna, please.’

  Kate looked down. Another blue plate of perfect rice rectangles had appeared. She grabbed them, slapped on more fish, squeezed, and handed it off.

  ‘That looks great! Thank you!’

  She smiled. ‘You’re welcome.’

  The line of customers was endless. But they were nice. They liked her sushi. And the blue plates of rice rectangles kept appearing.

  Soon Kate was chatting with the Angelenos while she worked. They laughed. She laughed. She told them things about sushi that they didn’t know. They thanked her. A press photographer came by and took a picture of Kate. A man with a video camera filmed her working. Marcos surprised her by getting in line and asking her to make sushi for him. Toshi reclined on an ice chest, watching Kate and grinning.

  Daisuke was wearing his father’s chef’s jacket, draped over his tiny frame like a dress. The boy was running back and forth, snatching rice rectangles from the GTO as fast as the robot could spit them out. He loaded them onto a blue plate, ran them to the front of the stall, and slipped them onto the table by Kate. Then he ran back with an empty plate. He repeated this routine again and again.

  Across the street people danced to the music. Daisuke planted his hands on top of the sushi robot, gyrated his hips, and sang along.

  “Country roads,” he crooned, “take me home, to the place where I b
elong.”

  By the time the sushi stall shut down, the staff estimated that the students had served close to 4,000 pieces of sushi. Takumi gave one of his American classmates a high five.

  On the ride home, Kate sat in the backseat of the van. She couldn’t stop smiling. She remembered the sushi chef she’d gotten to know at her favorite sushi bar, the one who joked with her and made her feel special. Tonight, for the first time, she felt like she could do what he’d done. She wanted to stand behind the sushi bar and joke with her customers, and make them feel special.

  The van bumped back down the alley and pulled into the parking lot behind the restaurant. It was nearly 11:00 p.m. Kate climbed out and stretched her legs. There was a huge cleanup job ahead. Toshi dumped leftover rice in the trash. In the storeroom, Zoran threw boxes onto the shelves. Afraid he would start yelling, Kate hurried past.

  The kitchen was crowded. Along with the students, the regular restaurant staff was cleaning up as well. Kate washed dishes at the row of sinks. Someone sidled up to her. She looked up and saw that it was Toshi.

  “I was surprised at your confidence!” Toshi said.

  A huge smile spread across Kate’s face. “Thank you.”

  Weeks 3, 4, and 5

  10

  CHEF’S CHOICE

  On Monday morning, Zoran pulled the attendance clipboard off the wall and barked out each student’s name, as he did every morning.

  “Hai!” each student responded.

  Zoran stood at the head of the long classroom table and surveyed his students.

  “You far exceeded my expectations on Saturday,” he said. He paused. “But if your uniform is dirty, I will not let you in the class.”

  It was obvious that he was referring to Marcos, who probably hadn’t washed his chef’s jacket even once.