The Story of Sushi

T
his book is a work of documentary nonfiction, and all names, people, places, and events in the book are real. All descriptions rely on extensive firsthand reporting; the author witnessed most of the scenes described in the book and took detailed notes at the time. All speech in quotation marks (“ ”) was recorded in person by the author in a notebook or on tape at the time it was spoken or immediately afterwards. (In a few cases, quotation marks also indicate material quoted from a secondary source; these cases are generally clear from context and are noted in the source notes at the end of the book.) Speech in single quotation marks (‘ ’) represents speech that was not directly witnessed by the author but was described to the author as having occurred. Conversations between Japanese subjects in the story generally occurred in Japanese and were translated by the author. Japanese names are presented in Western format, with the given name first and the surname last. The author has no affiliation with the California Sushi Academy. He paid for all sushi consumed in the course of his research.

I AM A FISH,

CUISINE IS MY SEA.

Calligraphy by the first Iron Chef Japanese, Rokusaburo Michiba, presented as a gift to Toshi Sugiura of the California Sushi Academy, June 2000.

W
eek 1

1
SUSHI SCHOOL

K
ate Murray’s alarm clock went off at 5:30 a.m. She forced her eyes open. Her college classes had never started before noon.

The day before—the Fourth of July 2005—Kate had loaded her Mustang and driven up the coast from San Diego to Los Angeles. Now unopened boxes sat scattered around the little house. She still had no furniture, and she missed her dog.

Kate dragged herself out of bed. In the bathroom mirror she looked skinny. The weeks leading up to sushi school had been stressful, and she’d stopped eating again.

On the drive to the academy she hit L.A. traffic. By the time she finally reached Hermosa Beach, she was running late. Fit-looking people on Rollerblades glided down the strip along the sandy beach, and several surfers were already out testing the waves. The Pacific Ocean stretched to the horizon. A block from the beach, Kate located the Hama Hermosa sushi restaurant and hurried inside.

She entered the foyer and saw a small dining room on her left with tables, a couple of booths, and a shiny red sushi bar. The restaurant appeared to be deserted, except for a gold Buddha sitting in an alcove.

Through a cutout in the hallway wall Kate glimpsed people. She followed the hall and stepped into a large space with a high ceiling and skylights. A second red sushi bar ran across the back
wall. Down the center of the room stretched a stainless-steel table with sinks built into it, like in a chemistry lab.

All eyes turned and looked at Kate. Her classmates had already taken all the spots at the table, except for the one closest to the Japanese chef at the head of the table.
Crap,
Kate thought. She walked up to the remaining space. Everyone was standing. There were no chairs.

The chef was a short man with a shaved head. He introduced himself as Toshi Sugiura, chief executive officer (CEO) of the California Sushi Academy. He was also executive chef of the Hama Hermosa restaurant. The restaurant and the academy shared the building.

Toshi was a pioneer of American sushi. He had started serving sushi in Los Angeles in 1978, before most Americans had even heard of it. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Toshi’s sushi bar and restaurant—Hama Venice, in Venice Beach, just south of Santa Monica—had been one of the hottest sushi spots in all of L.A. Two years ago Toshi had shifted his efforts to the current restaurant, and it hadn’t been long before Phil Jackson, coach of the L.A. Lakers, had stopped by to inscribe his signature on the wall.

Toshi had founded the California Sushi Academy in 1998. Opening a school for sushi chefs was unprecedented. For nearly 200 years, becoming a sushi chef had required a long apprenticeship—often five or more years. Toshi wanted to train people in a few months.

Toshi hired staff to manage the school and to teach. When the academy opened, three-quarters of the applicants were not even Asian. Toshi accepted them all. He couldn’t be certain, but he assumed that many of his fellow Japanese sushi chefs considered him a traitor for welcoming outsiders into the world of sushi. The way Toshi saw it, Americans had already embraced sushi, and it would be foolish not to train American chefs. Since then, a few other sushi schools had opened in L.A., including the Sushi Chef Institute, run by a former instructor at Toshi’s academy. So far, these were the only formal training programs for sushi chefs in the United States.

Anyone could apply to the California Sushi Academy. Toshi didn’t require his students to have restaurant or kitchen experi
ence. Hobbyists and home cooks had attended the school, along with experienced chefs, including seasoned veterans of some of America’s best kitchens. Not all of the graduates went on to become professional sushi chefs. Over the years, the proportion of non-Asian students had remained high.

‘
Ohaiy
gozaimasu!
’ Toshi bellowed to the class. This meant “Good morning” in Japanese. But around the restaurant, the chefs said it whenever they arrived for work, even if it was afternoon or evening.

Toshi taught the class another word. ‘
Irasshaimase!
’ That meant “Welcome.” Sushi chefs yelled it whenever a customer walked in. Most Americans thought Japanese people were supposed to act quiet and dignified. But in old Tokyo, sushi chefs were loud and boisterous.

Kate liked Toshi immediately. He was cheerful and stern at the same time, like a monk who was also a kung-fu warrior. Toshi asked the nine students to introduce themselves. Kate looked around at the people who would be her classmates for the next twelve weeks. There were six men and two other women. It had never occurred to her that most of her classmates would be men. It hadn’t occurred to her that there was anything unusual about a woman, or her in particular, wanting to become a sushi chef. Kate didn’t see why a 20-year-old Irish-Italian girl with a pierced belly button and a nose stud couldn’t make sushi.

The other students were also young, and a majority of them were white. They had come to the academy for a variety of reasons. Most of them had restaurant kitchen experience, and a few already had experience making sushi. Kate had neither.

One young man had made his start mass-producing sushi at a Whole Foods grocery store in North Carolina, and he wanted to move up to restaurant work. Another had seen how widespread sushi had become, and he hoped to purchase his own sushi restaurant in southern California. A man from El Paso, Texas, had been sent by his company, a real-estate and restaurant-development firm, because sushi was the hot new meal on the Mexican border.

Several of the students, including a woman from Barcelona, wanted to open their own catering businesses. A 17-year-old blond boy from Colorado thought working behind a sushi bar would be a
great way to meet girls. There was one young woman, still in high school, who looked Japanese. She was from L.A.—her dad wanted her to learn Japanese food. There were two guys who looked Filipino or Indonesian, but they were both American.

At the far end of the table was a man from Japan. He introduced himself in broken English, in a quiet voice. Apparently, he’d come all the way from Japan to learn sushi in California. That seemed odd.

Toshi turned the class over to the academy’s coordinator for student affairs, a Japanese-American man named Jay Terauchi. Jay would be keeping his eye on the students throughout the semester and would help them with whatever they needed.

Jay handed out their uniforms: black pants, white chef’s jackets embroidered with the words “California Sushi Academy,” and white pillbox-style chef’s caps. Dressed in her street clothes, Kate had a slim and shapely figure. But her chef’s jacket was too big, and when she put it on, she looked like a kitchen appliance.

Finally, Toshi introduced the academy’s chief instructor, who would be teaching most of the classes. Kate was surprised to see that the instructor wasn’t Japanese.

‘My name is Zoran,’ he said in an Australian accent. His full name was Zoran Lekic. The exotic-sounding name came from his Yugoslav ancestry. He’d grown up in Australia.

As if a Yugoslav-Australian sushi chef wasn’t unusual enough, Zoran had served in the elite Royal Australian Air Force, had been a champion bodybuilder, and had worked as right-hand man to one of Australia’s wealthiest entrepreneurs. In search of something new, he’d attended the California Sushi Academy and become a sushi prodigy. When he graduated in 2003, at the age of 31, Toshi had hired him on the spot.

Now Zoran taught at the academy during the day and worked behind the sushi bar in the restaurant at night. Zoran was well-proportioned, but there was nothing left of the bodybuilder’s physique. He was wiry, with angular features, and he moved and spoke with speed and precision.

Zoran explained that each student would have to complete 100 intern hours to graduate. The students could earn intern hours by assisting the chefs in the restaurant, helping with catering jobs, and
aiding Zoran or Jay when one of them taught the academy’s basic, three-hour sushi-making class for civilians, usually on weekends.

While Zoran was talking, Toshi circled the table and handed out a black case to each student. One by one, the students flicked open the latches and raised the lids. Inside each case was $600 worth of knives. Japanese characters were etched into the blades. The knives had been hand-forged by Japanese craftsmen in a village famous for its samurai swords.

Kate stared. The biggest knife she’d ever held was a steak knife. The only thing she’d ever cooked with any confidence was scrambled eggs. When she’d signed up for sushi school, she’d imagined rolling up rice with a bamboo mat.

Japanese knives are among the sharpest in the world. After a powerful warlord unified Japan in 1600, a period of peace followed, and by the late 1800s, the samurai were no longer allowed to carry swords. The artisans who crafted swords turned their skills to forging kitchen knives from laminated, high-carbon steel. The blades hold a sharper edge than Western knives. The knives are beveled on only one side of the blade, instead of on both sides, like a Western knife. This extends the edge and makes Japanese knives sharper still. At banquets in medieval Japan for samurai and noblemen, chefs performed astonishing displays of knife work, slicing up fish and animals before the assembled guests. To this day, priests affiliated with the emperor wield knives in similar ceremonies at Shinto shrines.

Zoran held up the longest knife from his own case, a slim, 10-inch blade with a point like a stiletto.

‘This is your
yanagi,
’ Zoran said.

The name means “willow.” The tapered blade is the shape of a willow leaf. This is the sushi chef’s primary knife for work behind the sushi bar. Zoran held up two more knives for kitchen use: a rectangular blade for cutting vegetables, called a
usuba,
and a triangular blade for filleting fish, called a
deba.

Zoran told the class they would have to sharpen their knives by hand—every day. The high-carbon blade allows for a very sharp edge, but the edge is also more fragile, and the metal rusts easily, so Japanese knives require daily care. Through sharpening, Zoran explained, a sushi chef trains his knife to his specific needs. A sushi
chef shares his knives with no one, Zoran added, unless the sharing is between master and disciple.

Suddenly Zoran was handing out cucumbers.

‘Okay, get out your
usuba
!’ he yelled. Kate was already overwhelmed by all the Japanese words. She looked around. The other students pulled out their rectangular knives.

Zoran held a long chunk of cucumber in front of him vertically and spun it in his left hand. With the knife in his right, he peeled off a lengthy ribbon. Zoran’s fingers moved in a blur beside the blade, which was pointed straight at his face.

‘
Katsura-muki!
’ Zoran shouted. The word meant “column peel.” When the ribbon of cucumber dangled to his cutting board, Zoran stopped.

‘Okay, your turn!’ he yelled.

The other students picked up their chunks of cucumber and imitated Zoran. Kate lifted her rectangular knife. It felt awkward and dangerous in her small hand. It was a huge razor blade with a handle. Kate’s mother and grandmother had always said,
Never cut toward yourself.

Oh my God,
Kate thought,
I don’t have medical insurance.
The guy across from her was peeling off a long ribbon.

Zoran lay several sheets of cucumber ribbon on top of each other and chopped them at high speed—
thwack-thwack-thwack-thwack
—with a noise like a machine gun. He yelled out another Japanese word.

‘
Sengiri!
’ This was how to cut the little cucumber sticks that went inside sushi rolls.

Kate tried to cut like the others, but she managed only to destroy her cucumber. Zoran glowered at her misshapen slices. He handed her a couple of his ribbons.

‘You’re going to have to use these,’ he said. None of the other students needed extra help.

When everyone had cut the cucumbers, Zoran made them do it all over again.

When the class finally ended at 12:30, the other students practiced sharpening their knives. They rubbed their blades carefully across blocks of volcanic stone, their fingertips pressed against the high-carbon steel. To Kate it looked dangerous. One slip, and
she could slice the tip of her fingers right off. She shut her knife case without sharpening anything and slipped out of the building. When she arrived at her Mustang she found a parking ticket on the windshield.

On the drive back to her empty house, she kept thinking,
What have I done?

The next morning in class Kate opened her knife case. Overnight the blades had rusted. Zoran glared from the head of the table.

‘Kate,’ he yelled, in front of the whole class, ‘your knives are terrible!’

Everyone looked. Zoran handed her one of his knives.

‘You’re going to have to use this.’

The rest of the week was a disaster. Kate couldn’t do anything right.