As some of you might remember, I lived in Tokyo for awhile when I was a grad student. When I left the States, I had never eaten Japanese food before and, as a microbiologist, I was worried about my impending death after being eaten alive by parasitic worms that I would get from eating raw fish. I worried about this until I had my first taste of sushi. After my first taste of sushi, well, I didn't care if I died as the result of eating Japenese cuisine; I simply knew that I had to have more and that, if I did die, it would be with a smile and tuna sashimi on my lips. The food was fabulous beyond words.
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Hai! This is too suzuki for words, and I banzaid my pants. What a bunch os sushis indeed!
Kanishiwa!
The irony is that despite the modern stylization of sushi, it probably started in very primitive fashion among poor folk. As I heard the scenario: Imagine a Japanese fisherman working on the dock with his buddies: "Damn, I'm hungry, and there's no stove out here, and all I've got anyway is this riceball my wife wrapped for me. Hey, just hand me that fish, I'll gut it right here...."
Sugoi omoshiroi da yo!
This is my favorite sushi video -- from the Japan Culture Lab's series of guides for foreigners: How to Enjoy Sushi (Google video).
I can't find it now, but there's a memoir online somewhere written by the wife of a Christian missionary in the mid-19th century where she describes being served "Japanese sandwiches" consisting of "morsels of fish" on a bed of sticky rice. It's the earliest reference to sushi in English, and it was pretty clearly an upper-class, fussy kind of food even then. As I recall, the first Westerner to eat sushi thought it was pretty tasty back then, too.