Where did sushi originate?

The short answer

Sushi began as fish packed in rice to ferment, a way of keeping fish that started in Southeast Asia and southern China and reached Japan more than 1,000 years ago. The sushi you picture today, a slice of fish on vinegared rice, came much later: street sellers in Edo, the city now called Tokyo, made nigiri a fast food in the early 1800s.

Meridish, the daily game behind this site, asks you to tap the map where each dish was born, down to the town or city. Put that question to nigiri and you get Edo. The fermented original belongs to a whole region, the river basins of mainland Southeast Asia.

Fish packed in rice

The first sushi kept fish from rotting. Cooks salted freshwater fish and packed it into cooked rice. As the rice fermented it made lactic acid, which worked with the salt to hold back the bacteria that spoil fish. Months later they threw the rice away and ate the fish. You'll see this early form called narezushi, or "aged sushi".

The method most likely began along the Mekong and Irrawaddy rivers. Han Chinese migrants learned it from the Baiyue, the non-Han peoples of southern China, and the Chinese character for it, 鮓, appears in records from the 2nd century AD. Sources disagree on when it reached Japan. One account ties it to wet-field rice farming in the Yayoi period, while PBS puts it in the 9th century, when Buddhist rules against eating meat made fish a staple. Japan's Yōrō Code of 718 already uses two characters for sushi, though theories differ on which food they meant.

You can still taste narezushi around Lake Biwa in Shiga Prefecture. Funazushi there starts with nigorobuna, a crucian carp native to the lake, which makers pickle in July with rice from the nearby paddies and leave to ferment for more than half a year. Shiga's prefectural government calls it the precursor of regular sushi, and PBS traces it back more than 1,000 years.

From fermenting to vinegar

Japanese cooks spent centuries cutting the wait. In the Muromachi period (1336 to 1573) a shorter ferment, namanare, let people eat the rice along with the fish. A cookbook from 1689 goes further. It describes haya-zushi, "fast sushi", which skipped fermenting because vinegar gave the rice its sour taste at once. By the mid-1700s, sushi makers in Edo pressed vinegared rice and fish in a small wooden box for two hours and sliced it, and box sushi is still popular in Osaka and Kyoto.

Nigiri and the stalls of Edo

Edo grew to a million people after building work began there around 1600. Space was tight in its crowded districts, so food stalls called yatai did good business, and Utamaro's Ehon Edo suzume of 1786 shows sushi stalls in Ryōgoku and Asakusa. In the early 1800s, Edo's sushi makers dropped the box. They pressed vinegared rice by hand, laid fish on top and sold it from stalls after dark as nigiri, hand-formed sushi.

Early pieces were about three times the size of today's. The style took the name Edomae zushi, after the fresh fish from Edo-mae, the waters now called Tokyo Bay. The 19th-century writer Kitagawa Morisada listed the toppings, among them rolled omelette, tuna, gizzard shad, conger eel and shrimp. A piece cost 8 mon, and the omelette twice that, because eggs were a luxury.

Who invented nigiri?

Most accounts credit Hanaya Yohei (about 1799 to 1858), born Koizumi Yohei in Edo. He started out selling sushi on foot at night from wooden carrying boxes, moved up to a stall, and in 1824 set up in Ryōgoku, near a bridge over the Sumida River. His shop there, Yohei-zushi, drew long queues, and a sign near Ryōgoku Station marks the spot as the birthplace of Edomae sushi.

The claim that Yohei invented nigiri comes from Koizumi Ugai, a haiku poet related to Yohei, who dated nigiri to the first year of the Bunsei era, 1818, and wrote that others had tried the same method before Yohei and failed. Sushi Walker, a Japanese sushi publication, warns that a relative's account may not hold up in every detail. Some accounts name a rival, Sakaiya Matsugoro, whose shop in Fukagawa went by the name Matsu no sushi. PBS splits the difference: Yohei created modern nigiri, it says, or at least marketed it. The oldest written mention of nigiri, a senryū poem in the collection Yanagidaru, dates from 1827.

How nigiri spread across Japan

From the late 1890s, commercial ice reached sushi shops, and electric refrigerators came later. Toppings that cooks once cured or cooked could now go on raw, and over the following decades the pieces shrank toward the size you know. After the Great Kantō earthquake wrecked Tokyo in 1923, its sushi chefs scattered across Japan, and the usual story says they took Edo-style nigiri with them. In Tokyo itself, land prices fell, and sushi sellers moved their carts indoors.

Post-war food controls stopped sushi shops trading as before. Under a 1947 emergency order on restaurants, Tokyo's sushi guild negotiated a consignment system: a shop took in one gō of rice and handed back ten pieces of nigiri. Other regions copied it, and Edo-style nigiri became the standard across Japan. In 1958 Yoshiaki Shiraishi opened Genroku Sushi in Higashi-Osaka, the first conveyor-belt sushi restaurant, an idea he took from watching beer bottles on a conveyor at an Asahi brewery. Conveyor-belt sushi caught on across Japan after a restaurant served it at the 1970 World Expo in Osaka.

How sushi reached America

Los Angeles took to sushi first. The Los Angeles Herald described an American eating sushi at a Santa Monica luncheon in 1904, and the first American sushi shop reportedly opened in Little Tokyo in 1906. Anti-Japanese restrictions from 1907 cooled demand, and wartime internment closed many Japanese-American restaurants. In 1966 Noritoshi Kanai and his partner Harry Wolff opened Kawafuku in Little Tokyo, the first restaurant to serve traditional nigiri to American diners. Four years later Osho opened in Hollywood, the first sushi bar outside Little Tokyo. The historian Eric C. Rath ties sushi's spread across America in the 1980s to Japan's economic peak and to pop culture such as the TV series Shogun.

The California roll and its rival claims

The California roll turned sushi inside out, with the rice outside and the seaweed within, a style you'll see called uramaki. Its inventor is disputed. One story credits Ichiro Mashita of Tokyo Kaikan in Little Tokyo; his assistant, Teruo Imaizumi, said the two made a prototype in 1964, with avocado standing in for fatty tuna out of season. The food writer Andrew F. Smith doubts it. "This is a nice story, but it's unlikely to be true," he wrote, pointing out that Los Angeles had plenty of fish markets by the 1960s. He favours Ken Seusa of Kin Jo, near Hollywood, whom an Associated Press story credited in 1979, and nobody challenged that credit for more than 20 years.

In Vancouver, Hidekazu Tojo, a Japanese-born chef who moved there in 1971, says he made it first. His Western customers wouldn't eat seaweed, so he hid it inside and called the roll Tojo-maki. He says the California name came later, as the roll spread. Accounts of his story date the roll anywhere from the early to the late 1970s, and his claim conflicts with food historians who place the roll in Los Angeles. In 2016 Japan's agriculture ministry named Tojo a goodwill ambassador for Japanese cuisine.

Sushi styles and where they come from

Some styles have a hometown you could pin on a map. For makizushi, the record gives a cookbook and a date but no town.

Pizza has its own family of hometowns, which you can read about in where pizza was invented. The dish pages show where every dish served so far in Meridish was born.

Questions

Sources

1. Wikipedia, History of sushi: narezushi's origins, the Baiyue, the Yōrō Code, the 1689 and 1728 cookbooks, makizushi, Kawafuku and early sushi in Los Angeles.
2. Wikipedia, Sushi: the word's meaning, namanare, early nigiri, Edomae, sushi styles and gunkanmaki.
3. Wikipedia (Japanese), 握り寿司 (Nigirizushi): the rival inventors, Yanagidaru, ice and refrigeration, the 1923 earthquake and the 1947 consignment system.
4. PBS Food, The History Kitchen, Discover the history of sushi.
5. Nippon.com, When sushi became a new fast food in Edo.
6. Time Out Tokyo, Takeo Funabiki, The mysteries of sushi: Part 2, fast food.
7. Sushi Walker, Sushi Legends Vol. 2: Hanaya Yohei, the founder of Edomae sushi, and the dictionary entries for nigiri and gunkan.
8. Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan, Shiga, Our Regional Cuisines.
9. Shiga Prefecture, Funazushi.
10. Osaka Convention and Tourism Bureau, Osaka sushi.
11. University of Chicago Press, Oishii: The History of Sushi, by Eric C. Rath, with an excerpt.
12. University of Kansas, History and evolution of sushi chronicled in 'Oishii' book.
13. Wikipedia, California roll.
14. TODAY, via NBC Los Angeles, What is the true history of the California roll?
15. Smithsonian Magazine, Japan honors the creator of the California roll.
16. Wikipedia, Conveyor belt sushi.