The History of Sushi

Please ... Sushi is not raw fish, in fact doesn't need to have any fish or anything raw in it. Sushi is not a "raw fish" movement. It is a "rice movement" if anything.

Just a sore spot from when I roll veggie sushi and people ask about the fish!

Sushi = vinegar + rice

Yeah, it annoys me too.

Sushi is frequently not eaten with fish at all; it's really only nigiri sushi (a pillow of rice with a slice of something on top) that emphasizes fish to any great degree. And while tuna is commonly served as sashimi, it's only one kind of dozens. If you would cut tuna sashimi in Japan you'd have a country-full of salarymen crying bitterly in their beers - for fifteen minutes, after which they'd shrug it off with a plate of sliced squid arms in soy and another round of Kirin.

McInerney does explain this technical difference between what sushi was and what sushi now is in his review.

Although raw fish is generally the first thing we think of when we think of sushi, it didn't start out that way. The Japanese tradition of eating fresh raw fish has nothing to do with sushi, Corson tells us. Sushi began as a way of preserving old fish. Rice farmers in Southeast Asia would pack fish in jars with cooked rice to preserve it. The fermented result tasted more like stinky cheese than like fresh hamachi; the Japanese, in adopting the strategy, gradually shortened the fermentation time, developing a fresher style of sushi that still relied on fermented rice for its distinctive sour taste.

Find me a sushi restaurant today that doesn't serve fish...

As for shrugging off the loss of bluefin tuna, given that one fish can sell for more than $100,000, I think there is more likely to be a national mourning (or, at the very least, some sort of wrestling competition) for the last bluefin than simply a squid substitution.

Find me a French restaurant that doesn't serve fish. That doesn't mean French cuisine is completely dependent on, or defined by, the use of that ingredient.

To put it another way, you won't find a sushi place unable to serve you several variations of a full and satisfying course without fish. Sushi is rice, nothing else.

Yep, one high-quality fish can sell for huge prices. It's bought by the top-restaurants, and the sashimi made from it commands prices fully in line with the raw ingredient. Take a guess at what proportion of Japan's inhabitants ever eat it, or eat it often enough to become any kind of habit or part of their daily life? Did you notice the rioting on the streets in the US when real Brie cheese and Foie Grais was outlawed? Me neither.

Most tuna used is not the rare, highly priced varieties. And while it's good and appreciated by many people, so is salmon, tai, katsuo, eel, octopus, shrimp, crab, scallops...

Again, I defer to McInerney, who has presumably read the books reviewed, while I have not--both about sushi and fish. He excerpts Issenberg from her book The Sushi Economy.

"In few places," Issenberg writes,"are the complex dynamics of globalization revealed as visibly as in the tuna's journey from the sea to the sushi bar."

Why did Issenberg choose the tuna over salmon, shrimp, crab, eel, or scallops? And, while I don't believe the Japanese economy would grind to a halt at the outlawing of tuna (though I also don't believe this would ever happen), Americans would never pay hundreds of dollars for Brie. Furthermore, I know many French restaurants that do not serve fish. Which is why Japan is accountable for nearly 40 percent of the imports of marine fish and fisheries products and France is not.

*shrug* yes, I only live in Japan and go to sushi places every week. What do I know, right? When you go to a sushi place, you may have one to three kinds of tuna for nigiri sushi (more choices at more expensive restaurants), out of 20-40 choices. Perhaps half to two-thirds are fish or shellfish in some form. For maki you have less fish and more vegetables or egg, and usually only one with tuna (the most popular by far is cucumber rolls), and for temaki - if they have it - there's just a couple of varieties with fish.

My point with real Brie and Foie Grais (which you do pay very expensively for), as well as truffles, beluga caviar and what have you is that the price level itself is a very clear signal that this is not a mass consumer product, and is not an important trading commodity for anybody else than those directly involved in the trade. Just like the items I listed above, removing blue-fin tuna would be a tragedy for a small group of wealthy gourmands and remove one choice for a brides' party of a lifetime, but the overall impact would be negligible.

Dear Janne,

I do not eat seafood (on principle) so I assure you that your knowledge of Japan and its cuisine trumps mine. I merely wanted to make two points: 1) that the sushi market (and we can get technically superficial with whether or not 'sushi' suffices as a term) has had impacts on fisheries stocks globally and that these two books appear to give a good historical overview, which is what shifting baselines aims to promote; 2) though bluefin may be now sought only by a small, elite group, the prestige associated with bluefin consumption (and its scarcity), is very dangerous indeed. I turn to Daniel Pauly, who, years ago, said this:

"It's not the average person we are trying to push one way or the other who does things that are really negative for the environment but it's the extreme person. The average person does not hunt bear, doesn't eat bears, nor does the average person require bear pancreas as traditional medicine. If you then make a campaign to not eat bear the average person is not bothering anyway. It's the extreme person. It is the that extreme person has to be prevented from eating bear by laws because that person is already out of reach of a campaign."

Pauly continues...

"If we're dealing with caviar and we want to protect the sturgeons, sure we can try to influence people who eat caviar. The very idea of eating caviar is to make a social statement. You're making a statement about wealth so you really need caviar to be expensive and rare. You can imagine that caviar even becomes illegal but that adds to the cache. I would rather see us putting lots of energy into governments to intervene."

Given your firsthand knowledge, what do you think the chances are that the Japanese government would make big efforts to preserve bluefin tuna stocks?

Hm, a couple of points. First, as you say you do not apparently eat fish yourself, and so has only second-hand knowledge about it. So, based on my reaction and that of the other posters above, can you accept that by misusing the word "sushi" you are mixing up two separate things, causing confusion and ultimately obscuring, not clarifying the point of your post?

Bluefin tuna is a delicacy, and a comparatively rare one. Not Beluga caviar or truffles kind of rare, but it certainly isn't lamb or squid either. The overall trade is small compared to the real bulk food products in the world. So, from that perspective, bluefin tuna just isn't very important. And while it has a fairly visible spot in the culinary conciousness of people here, it isn't a major foodstuff in any important sense. The point of view of the bluefin tuna is, of course, rather different.

But here you run into the same issues we already have in much larger scale for cod and other, more economically important, species. It is basically a tragedy of the commons where everybody is fishing more than the resource supports, and everybody does that because everybody else is, and if they refrain it just means somebody else picks up the surplus stock instead. The same mechanism goes for international relations, where one nation is liable to increase its quota in direct response to the added resources freed by another country decreasing theirs.

I am no fan of Japanese politics (as opposed to the country), but there really is a limited number of options available. They can regulate their own fisheries, but south American, US, Indian and so on are out of their reach. And they couldn't unilaterally decide to stop imports from one country or another (imports cathced completely legally - or at least with real documents asserting it) without running afoul on WTO rules on trade - one area where Japan is already constantly in trouble for other reasons, and thus all the more unlikely to want to stir the pot even more.

It's easy to point fingers at Japan for eating a lot of tuna and blaming sashimi for being tasty. Isn't most of the responsibility on those that catch tuna to do so in a sustainable manner?

Of course, lately the price of tuna - most varieties, not just bluefin - has been increasing along with the worldwide popularity. With enough of an increase the resource may become valuable enough to warrant real efforts at curbing overfishing. And it may give a good push to the longstanding efforts to develop farmed tuna - it is basically possible today for the species usually used for sashimi, but difficult to do economically.

I have misused the word sushi only in the sense that everyone else (including McInerney and the authors of the two books he reviewed) does. In fact, I would wager that the word sushi has, like many other words (think latte, which in Italy only refers to milk but, in the Western world, has come to mean an espresso drink) have done.

Perhaps sushi has retained its original meaning in Japan. This, however, has not translated to the rest of the world. A quick internet search reveals the Japanese website Nipponia, which asked Koyama Hirohisa, one of Japan's top chefs, to explain how to prepare sushi and sashimi.

"Sashimi and sushi are the best known ways to serve raw fish...Sushi is now popular worldwide. Hand-molded sushi consists of two parts--an easy-to-handle clump of rice seasoned with vinegar, and a topping of raw or cooked seafood."

I don't eat seafood. I do eat sushi. I understand this is possible, but vegetarian sushi is no longer the first thing that comes to any Westerner's mind.

In addition, I did not intend to point fingers at the Japanese, but merely link to a historical look at their seafood consumption and some of its implications (I will do this equally with the U.S. and shrimp at some point). You raise a good point about whether or not regulations of seafood are possible given global trade rules--in spite of demand or supply. As for your point about sustainable production, many economists would say that supply merely responds to demand, but I certainly believe a multi-faceted approach is necessary.

Your intimate knowledge of Japanese culinary culture is appreciated and I hope you continue to share as this blog further explores seafood consumption globally.

I don't understand, really. Why not call it "sashimi" - or just "fish"? Why persist in calling sushi at all if it causes confusion? Especially since by using "sushi" as a term you specifically exclude eating sashimi without sushi - a far more common way of eating high-end seafood in any case.

Anyway, I would not focus on bluefin tuna or Beluga carp in the first place; I'd worry rather more about the state of cod or shark for instance - species that are cornerstone species in their habitat or that are important staple foods.

I think the average North American would be unfamiliar with the term "sashimi", or would perhaps think that it represents only a certain specific type of sushi. Like it or not, 'sushi' here has become pretty much synonymous with 'raw fish' already, regardless the confusion it may cause.

Jennifer has several things right here. Japan does have a bluefin tuna problem, check here for more. In fact, Japan leads the world in many ocean overuse problems.
Also, sushi in the US vernacular means raw fish. You can argue whether it should mean that, but that's what it does mean.