The personally meaningful food I have chosen to research is sushi for my first blog post. Sushi is meaningful to me because I associate it with familiarity and a sense of home as I grew up eating it all the time in Steveston. I will be taking you on a deep-dive into the origins of sushi, its evolution over time and space, and its overall importance as a meaningful food.

This is an image of a painting of sushi by the artist Hiroshige dated from the early to mid-19th century. This showcases how similar sushi was even dating back around 200 years ago.

The origins of sushi is not as clear-cut as other foods out there. To be perfectly candid, the specific origins of the food remains a mystery for the most part. What is known is that sushi in the style we are most familiar with today found its origins in Japan, however, the time and specific place is not as definite. This being the case, the origins of sushi came to be surrounded by legends and myths, an aspect not uncommon regarding old foods. One of the most famous of these legends follows an elderly woman who began hiding her rice pots in the nests of ospreys to keep them hidden from thieves.[1] When she returned sometime later to collect her pots of rice, she found that the rice began to ferment.[2] Further, the woman discovered that the osprey’s left scraps if fish in the rice from when they ate.[3] The woman found that the mixture of the two proved not only to be delicious but it also served as a way to longer preserve fish.[4] Thus, as this legend goes, sushi came to be. Despite all the myth and legend, certain facts about the origins of sushi do exist, though somewhat disjointed they may seem. Evidence of fish fermentation with cooked rice exist in Chinese records that date back to the 4^th century.[5] Similar pieces of evidence place similar practices all over Southeast Asia many centuries ago.[6] However, most of these examples showcase certain steps in the process of what would later become the sushi we are contemporarily familiar with, from Japan. Sushi, as it is best known, most likely originated in 9^th century Japan when Buddhism spread into the islands from mainland Asia.[7] As the completed dish of sushi became more popular, it would evolve in certain ways and change with time and space as it eventually spread to become a globally popular dish.

This is a map of the capital city of Japan, Edo, in the mid-19^th century. This city exploded in size and population in only a couple centuries as evidenced by this map.

The evolution of sushi has been significant more many reasons. The first forms of sushi from Japan underwent a very different process of creation. From the 9^th century to around the 14^th century, sushi was most often made using golden carp, or funa, which was packed with salted rice and compacted with weighted objects to speed up fermentation.[8] However, speeding up the process was still relatively slow as it took months to complete which made it expensive and often only available to the wealthy classes. In the 17^th century, the Tokugawa Shogunate, the ruling system of Japan, moved the capital from Kyoto to Edo, which proved to have a significant effect on sushi.[9] It was during the rapid growth of Edo that vinegar became widely used in the fermentation process which quickened things even more. However, it was in the 19^th century that the most revolutionary aspect was used in the sushi making process. In 1824, a man named Hanaya Yohei opened a sushi stall in Edo, where he introduced something that made sushi a readily available food to the everyday person.[10] Yohei had used the recent advances in the fermentation process for speed but added something new. He began to serve sushi in a hand-pressed fashion where he placed a small slice of fish on top of a ball of rice, which became known as Nigiri sushi.[11] As the fish was fresh, the need for long-term fermentation became redundant. This new technique meant that sushi could be made in minutes, thus sparking the popularity wave of easy-access sushi which allowed for its launch onto the global stage. This global push came in the 1970s as a result of advances in refrigeration which allowed for sushi to meet the growing global demand.[12]

This is a portrait which contains an image of Hanaya Yohei, the man who ushered in the revolutionary Nigiri sushi.

This image showcases Nigiri style sushi much akin to what Hanaya Yohei created in Edo which revolutionized access to sushi for everyday people.

Sushi is an important dish, both locally in Japan and in the international sphere. Sushi allowed for Japan to become a global hub for seafood as it was the origin for the desire of this food that is synonymous with fish.[13] Sushi is vitally important to the cultural fabric of Japan because of its status as a staple food. Many aspects of Japan itself evolved and built itself around the lucrative fishing industry it created to support the local demand for sushi.[14] A local demand, which grew into a global one. The popularity of this food cannot be denied as it can be found all over the world. A reality that I am grateful for because, to me, there is no better meal than sushi.

[1] Tori Avery, “Discover the History of Sushi,” https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/history-of-sushi/, accessed March 1, 2023.

[2] Tori Avery, “Discover the History of Sushi,” https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/history-of-sushi/ [accessed March 1, 2023].

[3] Tori Avery, “Discover the History of Sushi,” https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/history-of-sushi/ [accessed March 1, 2023].

[4] Tori Avery, “Discover the History of Sushi,” https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/history-of-sushi/ [accessed March 1, 2023].

[5] Naomichi Ishige, The History and Culture of Japanese Food (New York, 2014), 228.

[6] Ishige, The History of and Culture of Japanese Food, 237.

[7] Tori Avery, “Discover the History of Sushi,” https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/history-of-sushi/ [accessed March 1, 2023].

[8] Ishige, The History of and Culture of Japanese Food, 54.

[9] Peter Armstrong, Hagi: A Feudal Capital in Tokugawa Japan (London, 2019), 45.

[10] Tori Avery, “Discover the History of Sushi,” https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/history-of-sushi/ [accessed March 1, 2023].

[11] Tori Avery, “Discover the History of Sushi,” https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/history-of-sushi/ [accessed March 1, 2023].

[12] Rumi Sakamoto and Matthew Allen, “There’s Something Fishy About That Sushi: How Japan Interprets the Global Sushi Boom,” Japan Forum 23, no. 1 (2011) 119.

[13] Weebly, “The Importance of Sushi,” https://worldhistoryofsushi.weebly.com/the-importance-of-sushi.html, accessed March 1, 2023.

[14] Weebly, “The Importance of Sushi,” https://worldhistoryofsushi.weebly.com/the-importance-of-sushi.html [accessed March 1, 2023].

Armstrong, Peter. Hagi: A Feudal Capital in Tokugawa Japan. London: Routledge, 2019. Avey, Tori. “Discover the History of Sushi.” https://www.pbs.org/food/the-history-kitchen/history-of-sushi/ [accessed March 1, 2023]. Ishige, Naomichi. The History and Culture of Japanese Food. New York: Routledge, 2014. Sakamoto, Rumi and Matthew Allen. "There's Something Fishy About That Sushi: How Japan Interprets the Global Sushi Boom." Japan Forum 23, no. 1 (2011): 99-121. Weebly. “The Importance of Sushi.” https://worldhistoryofsushi.weebly.com/the-importance-of-sushi.html [accessed March 1, 2023]. Images (in order of appearance): Utagawa Hiroshige, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/64/Hiroshige_Bowl_of_Sushi.jpg Scanned University of Texas Libraries, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b1/Edo_1844-1848_Map.jpg Kawabata Gyokusho (1842-1913), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/93/Hanaya_Yohei.jpg Alpha from Melbourne, Australia, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/60/Nigiri_Sushi_Hosomaki_-_Uta_Sushi_Bar_5049056668.jpg