The Story of Sushi (6 page)

In 2003, Toshi’s world crashed down around him. He’d been having too much fun to pay much attention to business management. He was cited for twenty-four years of tax evasion. Toshi’s bank accounts were stripped bare and Hama Venice was put up for sale. Unlike citizens in Japan in AD 718, Toshi could not use sushi to pay his taxes.

In Hermosa Beach, a few miles from Venice, a friend of Toshi’s owned a restaurant called California Beach. Once a legend, it had lost ground to an invasion of cheap, generic sushi places. The owner wanted to relaunch the restaurant with a new look. Hama Hermosa was born.

Building a new clientele for the new restaurant from scratch was difficult and competition was stiff. Toshi was still responsible for the fate of several other restaurants and a small army of chefs and staff, not to mention his wife, 14-year-old daughter, and 13-year-old son. As soon as he put money in the bank, the authorities removed it to pay off his debt. The stresses mounted.

In April 2005, on a Friday night during dinner service, Toshi was slicing scallops behind the sushi bar when he put down his knife. He couldn’t move or speak properly. He nearly collapsed, but steadied himself. He rested for a few minutes, then forced himself to keep making sushi, until his customers had all gone home. He tried to work in his office the next day, but gave up. Finally he saw a doctor. He’d had a stroke.

Toshi gradually improved, and soon he was back at work. He was lucky to be functioning at all. But try as he might, most of his energy and charisma had deserted him. For Toshi, that was like losing his soul.

Hama Hermosa started losing customers, and now it was losing money.

The one bright spot was the academy. Toshi loved seeing new students arrive to begin their training. The beginning of a semester always held a sense of anticipation and possibility.

This was the academy’s thirtieth class, and he’d already grown
fond of the students. Most of them would do well, he thought. But he was worried about Kate. It was obvious that she lacked confidence. A number of women had come through his sushi academy, and the ones who’d succeeded were the ones who’d believed in themselves. Given the challenges that female sushi chefs faced, if Kate was going to survive in the world of sushi, somehow she’d have to find confidence.

I
n Japan, a popular comic book series called
Sushi Chef Kirara’s Job
tells the fictional tale of a young female sushi chef. Kirara’s father deserts her mother, and her mother dies when Kirara is young. A kindly old sushi chef of great fame adopts Kirara and raises her in his small neighborhood sushi shop. When the old chef gets sick, he must close the shop. Out of love for the old man, Kirara decides to reopen his famous shop herself.

The old man is the last chef to have been taught the secret techniques of the most renowned sushi establishment of old Tokyo. Kirara is his only protege, and she struggles to keep the lineage alive. To prove that his old style of traditional sushi is still the best, Kirara goes on a television show called
Sushi Battle 21,
in which sushi chefs compete for the title of national champion.

Kirara is a skinny girl with a pretty face. The male sushi chefs are muscle-bound athletes. They practice sushi making as if it were a martial art, and challenge each other to duels of skill and endurance, like samurai defending their honor. Kirara’s chief rival, a man named Sakamaki, pumps iron at the gym as part of his sushi training.

Prior to the battle, Sakamaki visits Kirara’s little shop and orders sushi at the bar. While waiting for his food he lights a cigarette. When the sushi comes, he taps his cigarette ash onto the fish. “You don’t understand this world,” Sakamaki growls at Kirara, “because you are a woman.”

Later, Kirara meets the only other woman chef in the contest. The woman is a hardened veteran. She tells Kirara she has suffered all manner of discrimination and humiliation, from both customers and other chefs. To survive, she has cut her hair short and obliterated any hint of femininity in her appearance and personality. “I have become both physically and mentally a man,” she says.

The comic book tale isn’t far from the truth. In real-life Japan, sushi is a man’s world. Male chefs use all manner of excuses to defend their sushi bars against women who want to work there. Women can’t be sushi chefs, they say, because makeup, body lotion, and perfume destroy the flavor of the fish and rice. Some male chefs claim that the area behind the sushi bar is sacred space and would be defiled by the presence of a woman. Others say women don’t have the reflexes necessary for the knife work. Until 1999, Japan had a law prohibiting women from working later than 10:00 p.m. at any job, which made employment at most sushi bars impossible. A writer in Tokyo asked her friends if they would eat sushi made by a female chef, and even the women said no.

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 remem
bers 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.