The Story of Sushi (8 page)

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 specified 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 belong.”

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.”

O
n 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.

“Hygiene!” Zoran yelled. “Adjust your hats!”

Kate was riding high after the party at Paramount. For the first time since she’d arrived at sushi school she’d actually believed it was possible she could graduate and become a sushi chef. Maybe her lack of kitchen skills didn’t matter. She’d proved to herself that she could interact with customers while squeezing together raw fish and rice. If she kept practicing, she wouldn’t even need help from the robot.

Zoran interrupted Kate’s reverie. He was telling the class that if they wanted to be sushi chefs, they couldn’t just squeeze together raw fish and rice. They had to have kitchen skills, and they had to know how to cook. And not just cook, but to cook the
multi-course courtly cuisine of Japan. A good sushi chef could toss out several fancy appetizers from a repertoire of traditional cuisine before he even started serving sushi. This was part of the craft of
omakase.

The word
omakase
means “I leave it up to you.” It’s what the sophisticated customer says to the chef when settling down at the sushi bar. Sushi connoisseurs seldom order off a menu. Traditionally, sushi bars in Japan didn’t even have menus.
Omakase
is an invitation to the chef—not just to serve what he thinks are the freshest ingredients of the day but also to show off his skills. And for any serious sushi chef, that includes cooking.

Zoran explained that courtly Japanese cuisine was called
kaiseki.
“
Kaiseki
cuisine originated from the traditional Japanese tea ceremony,” Zoran said. “It was the meal eaten at the end of the ceremony.”

Kaiseki
is a meal of many small dishes served one after another, Zoran told them. Sushi at the sushi bar is the same way: a meal of many small servings of different fish. In modern American terms,
kaiseki
and sushi are both a sort of chef’s tasting menu.

“Open your textbooks!” Zoran yelled. “Kate! Please read!”

Kate scrambled to get her book open, then cleared her throat and began in a monotone. The goal of the book, the author had written, was not to teach recipes. “The real purpose,” Kate read, “is to teach you how to cook in the spirit of Japan, whose pure and restrained effects with food constitute an art.”

Her classmates could barely hear her over the hum of refrigerators and freezers. Zoran interrupted Kate to add commentary.

“A Japanese person doesn’t feel he’s eaten dinner until he’s eaten rice,” Zoran said. “And miso soup should be at the end of the meal. When a Westerner sits down and orders miso soup to start, you know he doesn’t know anything about Japanese food.”

Zoran took over the reading in a loud voice. He jumped to a paragraph about drinking sake, the age-old Japanese rice liquor. Sake was a good accompaniment to
kaiseki
-style appetizers. But according to centuries of Japanese thinking, sake clashes with food that contains rice because the flavors of rice and rice liquor are too similar. Traditionally, sake and rice were never served together. Today, however, sushi restaurants serve as much sake as they can.
Sushi restaurants have high food costs. Pushing expensive sake is one way to make money.

Zoran moved on to a note about chopsticks. It seems that the Japanese have always had a thing about contamination. The textbook stated that at home, many Japanese use only their own personal pair of chopsticks, which are often small works of art, lacquered and decorated with inlay. But for a formal meal in a restaurant, people eat with cheap disposable chopsticks of unfinished cedar or bamboo. That way, they can be sure no one else’s lips have tainted their eating implements. The cost of purity is stiff. Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture estimates that the Japanese discard 25 billion pairs of chopsticks a year. Deforestation is leading some restaurants in Japan to switch to plastic. Many Americans believe it’s proper etiquette to rub their disposable chopsticks together before eating, to remove splinters. In Japan this is considered impolite.

“For
omakase,
” Zoran said, “you might start with three
kaiseki
-style appetizers.” The appetizers could be small simmered or grilled dishes that use any number of ingredients. Then the chef would serve fish. “You want to move from light to heavy, and be seasonal,” Zoran said. “For example, white fish, followed by scallops, followed by octopus. Those are all light, clean flavors. Then serve salmon or tuna, the heavier-flavored fish.”

Zoran grabbed a thick photo album off the shelf. “Okay, gather round.”

The pictures showed
kaiseki
-style appetizers that previous classes at the academy had cooked. “Some of these were absolutely terrible,” Zoran said. “But it gives you a sense of the variety.”

The elaborate sushi meals Zoran was describing seemed a far cry from modern sushi’s humble origins as fast food, served from stalls in old Tokyo.

In the decades after
nigiri
first appeared on the streets of Edo in the early 1800s, the shogun’s authority was undercut by political maneuvering. Behind the scenes, a noble named Seki
Nakano amassed enormous power. As it happened, his mansion was close to Yohei Sushi, the shop that belonged to Yohei Hanaya, the man
who first marketed
nigiri
successfully. That section of the city was, in a sense, “sushi central.” After Yohei Sushi’s success, a second large sushi shop had opened nearby, Pine Sushi.

Lords and officials seeking to influence Nakano passed by the sushi shops on their way to the mansion. Pine Sushi started to display extraordinary boxes of takeout sushi, involving a variety of different toppings on
nigiri,
many of them prepared with elaborate cooking or pickling methods. Yohei Sushi quickly followed suit. These fancy sushi boxes became the gift of choice for winning Nakano’s favor, and grew more and more elaborate as visitors strove to outdo each other with their presents.

The idea spread, and shops sprang up around the city for selling elaborate sushi gift boxes. The extravagance of these shops and the prices paid for their sushi surpassed even the most exclusive and expensive sushi bars of the fabled Ginza district in contemporary Tokyo.

The appearance of extravagant sushi matched a general trend in the city of Edo, as merchants and artisans with disposable income became epicures and used gourmet food as a fashion statement. The samurai forgot their military skills and fell into lives of indulgence and idle luxury.

Soon the political winds shifted. In the early 1840s, a group of conservative bureaucrats decided to clamp down. The government issued prohibitions against extravagance. Nakano was stripped of power, and soldiers swept through the city, rounding up prostitutes, pornographers—and sushi chefs. Pine Sushi and Yohei Sushi were shut down, and over 200 employees of fancy sushi shops were arrested.

Lucky for sushi, the reforms didn’t last, and the ringleader of the bureaucrats was ousted. Within a year or two, the high-end sushi shops were back in business, and even average citizens began to treat themselves to an occasional box of fancy sushi.

The stores prepared sushi to go or delivered it to the customer at his home or business. When the chefs packed the sushi to go, they separated the
nigiri
with decorative bamboo leaves. The leaves prevented the flavors from contaminating each other and added a mild antibacterial function. For their customers who were aristocrats, they even carved the family’s crest from a bamboo leaf and used it to decorate the sushi. The green pieces of decorative plastic
that are still served with takeout sushi are a carryover from these early practices. Some brands of plastic leaf are even coated with antibacterial chemicals.

Over time, some of the fancy to-go shops installed counters out front, similar to the street stalls, where pedestrians could stand and eat. A few shops added counters inside the shops or even tatamimat rooms where diners could sit. Either way, the chef generally knelt on his heels on a raised platform behind the counter, usually behind a latticework barrier.

After World War II, the American occupation authorities banned outdoor food stalls as a health hazard. So when sushi chefs started up their businesses again after the war, sushi moved indoors. Chefs retained the spirit of a stand-up stall by building high counters with rows of stools. Now the chefs stood while they made sushi instead of sitting. The twentieth-century sushi bar was born.

With cheap sushi no longer available on the street, people of modest means could not afford it. Working-class Japanese would have to wait decades until inexpensive conveyor-belt sushi restaurants appeared, returning sushi to its humbler roots. In the meantime, sushi chefs at the fancier sushi bars added elements of
kaiseki
cooking to the elaborate, multicourse meals they served, taking the high end of sushi further into the realm of extravagance.

Zoran led the students past the long sushi bar at the back of the classroom and into the kitchen. He pulled two large metal trays from the restaurant’s walk-in cooler.

The sushi toppings from which the chefs would pick while working at the sushi bar sat arrayed on small ceramic trays, each tightly wrapped in plastic wrap. There were slabs of tuna, salmon, yellowtail, flounder, and egg omelet; fillets of mackerel and grilled eel; pieces of octopus and squid; containers of spicy tuna mix, shredded snow crab, capelin roe, flying fish roe, and sea urchin roe.

“I want you to make one dish,” Zoran said. “Everything has to be from scratch. You have fifteen minutes to read from your book. Then you have one hour to make it.”

Kate looked at Zoran, not comprehending. The other students stared at the trays of ingredients.

Zoran snatched up some ingredients for himself. He grabbed a stainless-steel mixing bowl and pulled a stockpot from a shelf. Within seconds he was slicing and dicing and cooking.

The students stood still, in shock.

“See,” Zoran barked, “this is what happens when you’re at the sushi bar doing
omakase.
You get put on the spot!”