I began my official apprenticeship at age 28. My master physically beat me, which is a common practice. It’s corporal discipline.
Oo
This sounds eerily like a hazing. The author even says things like "When a white sushi chef says, 'I would work there, but it was too demanding,' then I say you are definitely too weak and we are not cut from the same cloth", as though enduring verbal and physical abuse is a sign of honour and hard work rather than dysfunction.
Culture and economics are strange. Is hazing the result of demanding discipline for high quality popular products? Or do popular products result in hazing since supply is bigger than demand?
What we can definitely say is sushi has become american standard and that without Japanese chefs, quality sushi would not always be available. Something I think about is sports. Winning doesnt always involve fun, sometimes its discipline, practicing endlessly and ensuring each member plays their part properly instead of give excuses and act solo.
Is hazing the problem? Or is not seeing hazings place in the world? Do we hate discipline ir just discipline at extremes? Why do we hit dogs to stop them from pooping inside and give them treets for listening to a name? I think there is grey area
How do you train dogs? How doglike are humans? At what point is explaination not enough to discipline a person? Repetition becomes ignored? The appearence of weakness gives room for rebellion?
You speak from a moral high ground but i really think these questions are worth exploring
By rewarding correct behaviour. Those questions have already been explored, and contemporary experts pretty much agree that punishing, especially physically beating, is counterproductive. Both for dogs and humans.
Well who am i to doubt? I have never attempted contemporary tactics nor seen them in action. What i have seen is what has worked in the past because we are still animals (including myself) despite all the incredible tools and knowledge we have. Do you have use cases? I think this an incredible thing to explore.
I can tell you think im insensitive. I appreciate you punishing my behaviour with stern talking. Clearly even you see the benefit
One of the less nice aspects of East Asian cultures. It's quite interesting how it seems to bypass many otherwise intelligent people's woo detectors.
When I was 14 I had a smart European teacher, who was into zen buddhism. He told of how people were beaten with sticks when they meditated to improve focus or posture or whatever.
It seems like the author has done quite a lot of reframing to rationalize and justify what he's been through. To me, that sounds horrible, and I doubt I would allow anyone to behave like that with me, tradition or not.
I read stories like this, and I wonder: does washing rice for 3 years really make your sushi that much better? The way sushi chefs talk about sushi makes it sound like there's some sort of massive, order-of-magnitude difference between them and the "sushi men". But at the end of the day, it's still fundamentally fish over rice.
I can't help but wonder: if you look at the high-end sushi biz with perfect objectivity, is it one of those "Joe Biden eating a sandwich" things? And if not, why aren't most other "quick" foods susceptible to this level of rigor and scrutiny?
I personally don't think that years spent washing rice will improve the taste of the food, but it may give the chef an appreciation for what he's doing.
The biggest difference between sushi joints is quality of fish. Everywhere in Japan can get fresh fish daily. The best I've had outside Japan was in Tenerife at the fish market in Santa Cruz. A lot of foreign places skimp because they don't care and neither do their customers. In Japan you wouldn't want to be known as "the guy who makes crappy sushi".
In the same vein, does the Japanese tea ceremony produce objectively better tea? Probably not, but it's a ritual.
It produces a better tea drinking experience. Well at least for me. I love rituals. Even a ritual as simple as popping a piece of lime into a bottle of Corona does it for me.
I can't answer your question but I don't think sushi is just fish over rice.
I just came back from Tokyo where I visited several highly regarded sushi restaurants. Rice and especially the temperature for which it's served is highly important. I ate a chirashi bowl and while the fish on top was excellent, I was actually more impressed with the rice. I also like how there's that perfect balance. The chef makes a piece of nigiri and you put it in your mouth. No need for extra soy sauce or wasabi. The fish melts in your mouth. On one day, I went to an excellent restaurant for sushi at lunch and didn't have plans for dinner so I stopped into a kaiten (conveyer belt) sushi place. I left after eating 2 plates (4 pieces). I had eaten at this kaizen place before and enjoyed it but after having a great experience for lunch, I just couldn't do it.
Having never been a huge fan of sushi, I recently had my first meal at a high end sushi place and the difference was massive. For the first time ever I really 'got' sushi. That being said the difference was 90% in the fish. Sure they probably used higher quality fish, but they also used different fish and experimented with different cuts of fish than the low-to-midend places and that made a massive difference.
Given that the competition for a good sushi place is much tougher and they have a long standing history of this, of course sushi in Japan will be better. It doesn't say anything about whether or not these rituals and power structures are important, though.
> does washing rice for 3 years really make your sushi that much better?
I think so. Preparing rice properly is not easy. Most of the time it's not done well, even in Japan.
> The way sushi chefs talk about sushi makes it sound like there's some sort of massive, order-of-magnitude difference between them and the "sushi men".
The way hackers talk about code makes it sound like there's some sort of massive, order-of-magnitude difference between them and some guy who started making web sites with Wordpress a couple years ago.
Having sushi prepared by a man who knows the names and favors of hundreds of different kinds of fish by heart, who knows exactly what time of year they're best, how to perfectly cut and season them, what temperature each needs to be served at, who has access to buy the best of the best and who won't accept any compromise on the rice is objectively different.
I also love the cheap junk food rolls. The ones that come with a generous amount of spicy mayo, tempura flakes and all that... but how much skill does it really take to prepare that? Deep fried stuff and favored mayo makes anything taste good.
It's like the difference between a cigarette and a cigar. Sure, they're both tobacco, and maybe the cigar is overpriced, but they're objectively not the same experience.
You are correct, experience to distinguish differences is important. The original commentor really went for the "it's just X, why is it better than Y".
There are some who have the experience, pallet, and knowledge where they could easily answer that question across every nuance brought up.
At the same point, given the tone of the original comment, there are people where any explanation will not make a difference.
Even more absurd is the main negative commentators may be the same type of people to push one popular coding solution over another because "popular".
Just like becoming adept with coding (not instantaneous web scale, redesign a few months later), cooking, knowledge of ingredients, experimentation, and learning takes time.
Three years on rice? The Japanese have built a culture around learning very specific techniques in-depth which has merit.
Your skepticism is spot on. The OC and similar comments seem typical of a tech culture that needs to get out and experience more.
Blind studies have shown that wine experts aren't nearly as good at identifying wine as they think they are. Same thing with high-end audio. People are incredibly susceptible to the placebo effect, and I think it's good to be skeptical when it comes to sensory matters — especially ones where the entrenched position is "this is sooo much better than everything else" and the price (whether in dollars or years of life given) is incredibly high. The brain is incentivized to value the product in these kinds of situation far out of proportion to its actual value.
> I read stories like this, and I wonder: does washing rice for 3 years really make your sushi that much better?
It's tutelage and discipline. Someone who hasn't worked in a busy kitchen wouldn't understand how much mental/physical discipline is required. "Paying your dues" is pretty common, around the world.
This is true of ALL arts and endeavours more generally: that it takes years of first hand experience to be able to appreciate the last stretch of 80/20 (i.e. the last 20% that takes 80% of the effort to achieve). On top of this, there are many things unique to Japanese (Kamakura period and later) philosophy that one should understand to gain contextual awareness.
For an example that will be close to the HN readership, to a freshly graduated Harvard MBA and former McKinsey consultant with a BA in Economics, a self-taught full stack web developer with a couple years experience is for all intents and purposes the same in skills as an MIT post-doc in computer science with a few papers published (I've also met some "business" folks who think the web dev is "superior" because he "gets things done" and his output is "prettier").
I personally think that one should achieve depth in at least one field to appreciate just how hard it is to get to the top of it. As a former classical musician, I can absolutely tell the difference between a good pianist such as you might find playing on a typical night at the Lincoln Centre in New York, and a "once in a generation" pianist such as Richter; this came at the cost of perhaps 2 decades of purposeful study and practicing the art. But my friends with little experience of classical music do not get quite as excited about Richter.
The Japanese are also unique due to the history of their country shaping their philosophy of art (which I will try to summarize based on my very limited understanding - I'd love to be corrected by more knowledgeable readers).
The Heian-period aristocrats, who looked up to the mainland Chinese civilisation, became so decadent and self-focused in their seeking of ever increasing sophistication that they completely lost interest in the running of their own country and the resulting chaos led to the rise of warlords (Daimyo) and a ruling military elite structure based in many parts on fighting ability (this is not unique to Japan: "may they eat cake!").
The Heian period marked spirits (exiling someone from court for having composed a distasteful poem or wearing a slightly mismatched ensemble being, generally, not a good governance principle). So when the Daimyo stopped fighting each other, united under the Tokugawa shogunate, thus having more time to do things other than get good at fighting [1], they sought to display status in other less flashy ways (this did happen later - cf the Rinpa school of painting), a form of counter-signalling based on taste rather than wealth, such as the very materially simple tea ceremony and teahouse. In other words, it's not about the tea, but about the way it is served and the contextual notes. This was helped by the idea that Spartans make better warriors than hedonists.
On top of this and perhaps linked ("dying a good warrior death young, is more honorable and valuable than dying old in your bed having not fought"), the philosophy of art tends towards valuing things like the "ephemeral nature of life" and making very subtle statements related to it. For example, there is a phenomenon in Japan of "the first tuna catch of the year" which is a very expensive and prized fish, almost a celebration. But for you, that's just a slice of tuna, and chemically, it might just be the very same composition as much of the tuna on offer the rest of the year. It would be missing the point - it is the act of catching the first tuna of the year (or it might be the first tuna caught after they come back from a migration where they get fat or something - it's seasonal, I can't remember the details), and the eating of that tuna at that particular time, that is valued by the consumer. Similarly, the rice is designed to be served at a specific temperature, and to "just" hold together at that temperature and with that mix and at that amount of time after being hand shaped for you, and an experienced consumer wil...
A white female friend of mine has worked as a sushi chef. She'd already been through a culinary academy and worked as a line chef at a high end restaurant. She just saw sushi as an additional skill.
I think the chef being interviewed is looking to become a "celebrity chef" by being a "white sushi chef". Perception is a big part of the culinary scene in the USA today.
But here’s the thing: In many respects, I also recommend eating with a white sushi chef. He’s probably had to train a lot harder and knows a little bit more about what is actually going on then, let’s say, someone who can just land a sushi job just because he is Asian; in that sense, they literally bring nothing to the table besides being Asian.
yeah, after your story of how common it is to be beaten or forced to wash rice and fish for years among sushi apprentices, it makes sense that asian sushi chefs got their jobs 'literally' for being asian. oh also they're dumb
(additionally, it's ludicrous to use 'asian' as a stand-in here: any non-japanese prospective apprentice would likely be treated with disdain)
+1, I was gonna post about this quote. Extremely short sighted and offensive.
> they literally bring nothing to the table besides being Asian
Thanks for qualifying any Asian person as being nothing more than their race. I know it wasn't intentional, and the discrimination you face sucks, but please think more deeply when you write about race, especially races other than your own.
I'm not sure if I'm taking something out of context but if you believe sushi is a Japanese thing there are plenty of sushi restaurants all over America masquerading as Japanese sushi but actually run by Koreans or Chinese with zero formal training.
I know that the race of the chef is orthogonal to whether or not the sushi is good. But I'm also pretty confident that many sushi restaurants, especially in the west, are purposely being deceptive about what they claim to be representing.
I assumed the message above wasn't about claiming all asians are alike. Rather it's claiming that many people, especially non-asians can't tell the difference and so having an asian of any background is enough to fake out most customers on those areas.
The racism is absolutely indefensible. But aren't the tattoo's a major turn off for Japanese preconceptions? In America, it's the equivalent of your chef having Maori face tattoos. Unusual to say the least. See: http://japandailypress.com/the-view-of-tattoos-in-japanese-s...
> But aren't the tattoo's a major turn off for Japanese preconceptions? In America, it's the equivalent of your chef having Maori face tattoos.
Would this really be a problem in America? I've spent my whole life in America and while seeing Maori face tattoos is unusual, it would hardly be a "turn-off" or even remotely negative if I saw that my chef had them. Do you mind if I ask what part of America you're in?
This article just comes across as pretentious, honestly. The part about being beaten as some kind of teaching tool is only remotely accepted because it's 'another culture'.
It's all bullshit. It's fish on rice. Some people make really great fish on rice and the majority of them happen to be Japanese, because that's where the love of it comes from. Let's stop trying to make it seem like magic, though. This is just sushi hipsterism.
There's a sushi place in Japan that's gotten great reviews even though the chefs only have 1 year of training. The narrative is that they've figured out that making great tasting sushi can be turned into something like a formula.
Obviously there's some flame wars going on in Japanese media about this, but one interesting point that has risen out of this is that the most difficult aspect of running a sushi restaurant isn't necessarily the skill of slapping fish on rice, but the ability to source your ingredients and judge its quality at the market every morning (I imagine "relationships with the vendor" matters as well).
Lastly, my friend who lives in Kyoto had an interesting perspective -- that without the "marketing narrative" of the decades of training going into creating quality sushi, they wouldn't be able to command such exorbitant prices as an industry and thus the myth is tantamount to the ongoing success of the trade.
I find your comment overly dismissive, let's apply this position to painting for comparison:
"It's all bullshit. It's oil on canvas. Some people make really great oil on canvas and the majority of them happen to be (white, I guess), because (I'm not sure, probably eurocentrism). Let's stop trying to make it seem like magic, though. This is just painting hipsterism."
That being said, I'm not a fan of sushi either and I find most of the fuss people make about it quite superficial (much like people make a fuss about yoga). Yet I'd still assume that it a form of art is at its core and that lot of masters do practice it as an art.
The eyes are far more subtle and sensitive to information, which is what differentiates "good" paintings from "bad" paintings. You could change the tiniest detail in a painting and totally change the emotions people feel about it. Paintings can access the parts of our brain that process human faces and deep memories.
Fish on rice, on the other hand, is a fairly simple combination of flavors. Most of the flavor comes from the fish. Sure, the quality of the fish matters, but I'd bet if you A/B tested "good" vs grocery-store sushi, people would randomly choose one or the other as "better". To put it another way, I don't believe in objective quality of sushi. I've had grocery store sushi that was better than super-authentic, super-expensive sushi.
This all reminds me of people thinking wine is an art and has much more subtlety than it has[1].
lol the amount of bias you have towards your own culture is astounding.
Taste and smell is a HUGELY sensitive skill. I don't doubt that changing the "tiniest detail in a paint" could "totally change the emotions", but for someone who doesn't really appreciate visual art nearly as much as food or music, I could be as easily dismissive towards it as you were towards food.
To further counter your arguments, if you A/B tested some modern art in a museum vs some art you bought in a walmart, and it was on the same medium (same quality canvas, etc), people would randomly choose one or the other as "better".
If you substitute sushi for coffee or microbrews, I think his dismissal will sound much more reasonable. A fluff article deifying a hipster barista or brewer is met with rolled eye, but write about the same concept in a different culture and the mystique seems genuine.
Coffee is one specific species of a bean, roasted, and brewed with varying amounts of hot water, milk, chocolate, and maybe a few other ingredients.
There are endless species of fish, with wildly different tastes (salmon, vs tuna, vs tuna belly, vs monkfish liver, vs catfish, don't tell me you can't taste a difference). In addition to fish, there are crustaceans (crab, shrimp, lobster, etc), mollusks (oyster, clam, squid, octopus, cuttlefish), and probably other major animal types I'm omitting.
The comparison is not adequate, sushi is inherently more diverse than coffee.
I think the hipsterism point stands. In the west it seems that, as long as it comes from far east, specially China, and specially specially Japan the land of manga, it's going to be magical and unique.
Superficial? Definitely. Art?, well, I'd say cratfy, rather than artistic.
That's a fair point. I think inserting painting here is slightly off base, but I'll take it.
What I have an issue with is that people make this seem like magic and that the sushi trade/business/culinary art has such amazing properties that we should just throw up our hands and say "Well, it's magic and it couldn't possibly be that anything they do is up for debate".
In the end, it's food. I think we should say "fuck that" to being beaten over some sushi as much as we should say "fuck that" to insane working hours and poor working conditions for chefs in other cuisine. It seems to me that some people suggest that sushi just wouldn't stay the same without the exact culture the masters have built around it. I think that's completely wrong.
To give this more perspective, I don't think we would accept people being beaten for making mistakes while painting, and the idea of not being able to practice painting because you're not allowed to do more than clean brushes for three years seems fairly ridiculous to me. I think there's a place for challenging that culture and saying there should be a better way.
> That being said, I'm not a fan of sushi either and I find most of the fuss people make about it quite superficial (much like people make a fuss about yoga). Yet I'd still assume that it a form of art is at its core and that lot of masters do practice it as an art.
I'm actually a very recent fan of sushi. I like it because it's like a foody snack and I can have some sushi next to me while I'm coding and just eat as I go. I'm sure the restaurants I go to are crap to real sushi-lovers, though. Especially since I'm fairly certain no one is getting beat in the kitchen, or having to wash rice for three years.
It's funny to see the level of fetishism around sushi. Here in Japan the spectrum goes all the way from cheap 100-yen-a-plate sushi joints, to Jiro. So it feels like sushi is a dish just like any other. In fact it always seemed to me like Kaiseki cuisine is probably a lot harder to prepare.
And the "wash rice for three years" thing is just a leftover from the way apprenticeship traditionally work here, whether it's for sushi or any other craft. It's always seemed to me like a particularly inefficient way of training someone and passing on your skills.
One might expect there to be fewer women sushi chefs - supposedly, hand temperature is critical for creation and delivery of the perfect sushi, and most women have colder hands than men. (there are of course women with very warm hands and men with very cold hands)
But that's where the value lies, no? Money in your bank account doesn't feel good in and of itself. I think the rise of hipsterism over here is the same process.
This is a very whiny article, and I find it funny that by the end of an article filled with the sentiment that racism in cooking is bad, that white people are just as capable, he finishes off by effectively saying that white people are better:
> [the white cook has] probably had to train a lot harder and knows a little bit more about what is actually going on then, let’s say, someone who can just land a sushi job just because he is Asian; in that sense, they literally bring nothing to the table besides being Asian.
On top of this, I find it troubling that diversity complaints and gender quotas are now apparently being aimed at legal/loved/admired cultural traditions. If Japanese sushi kitchens are mainly run by Japanese men...let them at it. What harm is it to you or anyone? As a white male, I don't expect that I'd be let become a geisha any time soon, and that seems fair enough to me...?
I'm not saying the racism the author has experienced is right, it sucks, it's wrong, and I actually know how he feels because I have had similar experiences with race in my own life. But I have read A LOT of arguments on HN trying to downplay or outright deny racism in tech, when that black engineering leader at Twitter quit, and for the combative white people there, who seemed to refuse to deny that racism existed here, but sympathize with this white guy here, let me ask you this:
Why should sushi restaurants lower their standards and let this white guy into their established restaurant, just for the sake of diversity? Sushi restaurants are all for equality, but we would never want them to lower their standards and serve lower quality food right? Also, if this white guy really wants to get in, he needs to change his culture. That laziness, loudness, and lack of respect for tradition will never get him anywhere in the sushi world.
So, let me get this straight: this comment is actually not about this topic, but about another topic with some black guy from twitter, and you're using this situation to look back at that previous post from before from another angle?
It's an honest question, because I tried to understand what point are you trying to make in context of this post, and failed.
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This sounds eerily like a hazing. The author even says things like "When a white sushi chef says, 'I would work there, but it was too demanding,' then I say you are definitely too weak and we are not cut from the same cloth", as though enduring verbal and physical abuse is a sign of honour and hard work rather than dysfunction.
What we can definitely say is sushi has become american standard and that without Japanese chefs, quality sushi would not always be available. Something I think about is sports. Winning doesnt always involve fun, sometimes its discipline, practicing endlessly and ensuring each member plays their part properly instead of give excuses and act solo.
Is hazing the problem? Or is not seeing hazings place in the world? Do we hate discipline ir just discipline at extremes? Why do we hit dogs to stop them from pooping inside and give them treets for listening to a name? I think there is grey area
You speak from a moral high ground but i really think these questions are worth exploring
By rewarding correct behaviour. Those questions have already been explored, and contemporary experts pretty much agree that punishing, especially physically beating, is counterproductive. Both for dogs and humans.
I can tell you think im insensitive. I appreciate you punishing my behaviour with stern talking. Clearly even you see the benefit
When I was 14 I had a smart European teacher, who was into zen buddhism. He told of how people were beaten with sticks when they meditated to improve focus or posture or whatever.
I can't help but wonder: if you look at the high-end sushi biz with perfect objectivity, is it one of those "Joe Biden eating a sandwich" things? And if not, why aren't most other "quick" foods susceptible to this level of rigor and scrutiny?
Guess I'll have to visit Japan to find out.
The biggest difference between sushi joints is quality of fish. Everywhere in Japan can get fresh fish daily. The best I've had outside Japan was in Tenerife at the fish market in Santa Cruz. A lot of foreign places skimp because they don't care and neither do their customers. In Japan you wouldn't want to be known as "the guy who makes crappy sushi".
In the same vein, does the Japanese tea ceremony produce objectively better tea? Probably not, but it's a ritual.
I just came back from Tokyo where I visited several highly regarded sushi restaurants. Rice and especially the temperature for which it's served is highly important. I ate a chirashi bowl and while the fish on top was excellent, I was actually more impressed with the rice. I also like how there's that perfect balance. The chef makes a piece of nigiri and you put it in your mouth. No need for extra soy sauce or wasabi. The fish melts in your mouth. On one day, I went to an excellent restaurant for sushi at lunch and didn't have plans for dinner so I stopped into a kaiten (conveyer belt) sushi place. I left after eating 2 plates (4 pieces). I had eaten at this kaizen place before and enjoyed it but after having a great experience for lunch, I just couldn't do it.
Given that the competition for a good sushi place is much tougher and they have a long standing history of this, of course sushi in Japan will be better. It doesn't say anything about whether or not these rituals and power structures are important, though.
I think so. Preparing rice properly is not easy. Most of the time it's not done well, even in Japan.
> The way sushi chefs talk about sushi makes it sound like there's some sort of massive, order-of-magnitude difference between them and the "sushi men".
The way hackers talk about code makes it sound like there's some sort of massive, order-of-magnitude difference between them and some guy who started making web sites with Wordpress a couple years ago.
Having sushi prepared by a man who knows the names and favors of hundreds of different kinds of fish by heart, who knows exactly what time of year they're best, how to perfectly cut and season them, what temperature each needs to be served at, who has access to buy the best of the best and who won't accept any compromise on the rice is objectively different.
I also love the cheap junk food rolls. The ones that come with a generous amount of spicy mayo, tempura flakes and all that... but how much skill does it really take to prepare that? Deep fried stuff and favored mayo makes anything taste good.
It's like the difference between a cigarette and a cigar. Sure, they're both tobacco, and maybe the cigar is overpriced, but they're objectively not the same experience.
There are some who have the experience, pallet, and knowledge where they could easily answer that question across every nuance brought up.
At the same point, given the tone of the original comment, there are people where any explanation will not make a difference.
Even more absurd is the main negative commentators may be the same type of people to push one popular coding solution over another because "popular".
Just like becoming adept with coding (not instantaneous web scale, redesign a few months later), cooking, knowledge of ingredients, experimentation, and learning takes time.
Three years on rice? The Japanese have built a culture around learning very specific techniques in-depth which has merit.
Your skepticism is spot on. The OC and similar comments seem typical of a tech culture that needs to get out and experience more.
It's tutelage and discipline. Someone who hasn't worked in a busy kitchen wouldn't understand how much mental/physical discipline is required. "Paying your dues" is pretty common, around the world.
For an example that will be close to the HN readership, to a freshly graduated Harvard MBA and former McKinsey consultant with a BA in Economics, a self-taught full stack web developer with a couple years experience is for all intents and purposes the same in skills as an MIT post-doc in computer science with a few papers published (I've also met some "business" folks who think the web dev is "superior" because he "gets things done" and his output is "prettier").
I personally think that one should achieve depth in at least one field to appreciate just how hard it is to get to the top of it. As a former classical musician, I can absolutely tell the difference between a good pianist such as you might find playing on a typical night at the Lincoln Centre in New York, and a "once in a generation" pianist such as Richter; this came at the cost of perhaps 2 decades of purposeful study and practicing the art. But my friends with little experience of classical music do not get quite as excited about Richter.
The Japanese are also unique due to the history of their country shaping their philosophy of art (which I will try to summarize based on my very limited understanding - I'd love to be corrected by more knowledgeable readers).
The Heian-period aristocrats, who looked up to the mainland Chinese civilisation, became so decadent and self-focused in their seeking of ever increasing sophistication that they completely lost interest in the running of their own country and the resulting chaos led to the rise of warlords (Daimyo) and a ruling military elite structure based in many parts on fighting ability (this is not unique to Japan: "may they eat cake!").
The Heian period marked spirits (exiling someone from court for having composed a distasteful poem or wearing a slightly mismatched ensemble being, generally, not a good governance principle). So when the Daimyo stopped fighting each other, united under the Tokugawa shogunate, thus having more time to do things other than get good at fighting [1], they sought to display status in other less flashy ways (this did happen later - cf the Rinpa school of painting), a form of counter-signalling based on taste rather than wealth, such as the very materially simple tea ceremony and teahouse. In other words, it's not about the tea, but about the way it is served and the contextual notes. This was helped by the idea that Spartans make better warriors than hedonists.
On top of this and perhaps linked ("dying a good warrior death young, is more honorable and valuable than dying old in your bed having not fought"), the philosophy of art tends towards valuing things like the "ephemeral nature of life" and making very subtle statements related to it. For example, there is a phenomenon in Japan of "the first tuna catch of the year" which is a very expensive and prized fish, almost a celebration. But for you, that's just a slice of tuna, and chemically, it might just be the very same composition as much of the tuna on offer the rest of the year. It would be missing the point - it is the act of catching the first tuna of the year (or it might be the first tuna caught after they come back from a migration where they get fat or something - it's seasonal, I can't remember the details), and the eating of that tuna at that particular time, that is valued by the consumer. Similarly, the rice is designed to be served at a specific temperature, and to "just" hold together at that temperature and with that mix and at that amount of time after being hand shaped for you, and an experienced consumer wil...
yeah, after your story of how common it is to be beaten or forced to wash rice and fish for years among sushi apprentices, it makes sense that asian sushi chefs got their jobs 'literally' for being asian. oh also they're dumb
(additionally, it's ludicrous to use 'asian' as a stand-in here: any non-japanese prospective apprentice would likely be treated with disdain)
> they literally bring nothing to the table besides being Asian
Thanks for qualifying any Asian person as being nothing more than their race. I know it wasn't intentional, and the discrimination you face sucks, but please think more deeply when you write about race, especially races other than your own.
I know that the race of the chef is orthogonal to whether or not the sushi is good. But I'm also pretty confident that many sushi restaurants, especially in the west, are purposely being deceptive about what they claim to be representing.
I assumed the message above wasn't about claiming all asians are alike. Rather it's claiming that many people, especially non-asians can't tell the difference and so having an asian of any background is enough to fake out most customers on those areas.
Would this really be a problem in America? I've spent my whole life in America and while seeing Maori face tattoos is unusual, it would hardly be a "turn-off" or even remotely negative if I saw that my chef had them. Do you mind if I ask what part of America you're in?
It's all bullshit. It's fish on rice. Some people make really great fish on rice and the majority of them happen to be Japanese, because that's where the love of it comes from. Let's stop trying to make it seem like magic, though. This is just sushi hipsterism.
Obviously there's some flame wars going on in Japanese media about this, but one interesting point that has risen out of this is that the most difficult aspect of running a sushi restaurant isn't necessarily the skill of slapping fish on rice, but the ability to source your ingredients and judge its quality at the market every morning (I imagine "relationships with the vendor" matters as well).
Lastly, my friend who lives in Kyoto had an interesting perspective -- that without the "marketing narrative" of the decades of training going into creating quality sushi, they wouldn't be able to command such exorbitant prices as an industry and thus the myth is tantamount to the ongoing success of the trade.
"It's all bullshit. It's oil on canvas. Some people make really great oil on canvas and the majority of them happen to be (white, I guess), because (I'm not sure, probably eurocentrism). Let's stop trying to make it seem like magic, though. This is just painting hipsterism."
That being said, I'm not a fan of sushi either and I find most of the fuss people make about it quite superficial (much like people make a fuss about yoga). Yet I'd still assume that it a form of art is at its core and that lot of masters do practice it as an art.
I was reading The Emigrants guide to Oregon and California.
In it they talked about streams in California which had Salmon between 10 and 60 pounds. Sixty pounds?
We have over fished. Period!
Whenever I see fishing boats here, or in exotic countries; I want to disappear. I don't find anything about Sushi exotic!
The eyes are far more subtle and sensitive to information, which is what differentiates "good" paintings from "bad" paintings. You could change the tiniest detail in a painting and totally change the emotions people feel about it. Paintings can access the parts of our brain that process human faces and deep memories.
Fish on rice, on the other hand, is a fairly simple combination of flavors. Most of the flavor comes from the fish. Sure, the quality of the fish matters, but I'd bet if you A/B tested "good" vs grocery-store sushi, people would randomly choose one or the other as "better". To put it another way, I don't believe in objective quality of sushi. I've had grocery store sushi that was better than super-authentic, super-expensive sushi.
This all reminds me of people thinking wine is an art and has much more subtlety than it has[1].
1. http://io9.gizmodo.com/wine-tasting-is-bullshit-heres-why-49...
Taste and smell is a HUGELY sensitive skill. I don't doubt that changing the "tiniest detail in a paint" could "totally change the emotions", but for someone who doesn't really appreciate visual art nearly as much as food or music, I could be as easily dismissive towards it as you were towards food.
To further counter your arguments, if you A/B tested some modern art in a museum vs some art you bought in a walmart, and it was on the same medium (same quality canvas, etc), people would randomly choose one or the other as "better".
There are endless species of fish, with wildly different tastes (salmon, vs tuna, vs tuna belly, vs monkfish liver, vs catfish, don't tell me you can't taste a difference). In addition to fish, there are crustaceans (crab, shrimp, lobster, etc), mollusks (oyster, clam, squid, octopus, cuttlefish), and probably other major animal types I'm omitting.
The comparison is not adequate, sushi is inherently more diverse than coffee.
That's a fair point. I think inserting painting here is slightly off base, but I'll take it.
What I have an issue with is that people make this seem like magic and that the sushi trade/business/culinary art has such amazing properties that we should just throw up our hands and say "Well, it's magic and it couldn't possibly be that anything they do is up for debate".
In the end, it's food. I think we should say "fuck that" to being beaten over some sushi as much as we should say "fuck that" to insane working hours and poor working conditions for chefs in other cuisine. It seems to me that some people suggest that sushi just wouldn't stay the same without the exact culture the masters have built around it. I think that's completely wrong.
To give this more perspective, I don't think we would accept people being beaten for making mistakes while painting, and the idea of not being able to practice painting because you're not allowed to do more than clean brushes for three years seems fairly ridiculous to me. I think there's a place for challenging that culture and saying there should be a better way.
> That being said, I'm not a fan of sushi either and I find most of the fuss people make about it quite superficial (much like people make a fuss about yoga). Yet I'd still assume that it a form of art is at its core and that lot of masters do practice it as an art.
I'm actually a very recent fan of sushi. I like it because it's like a foody snack and I can have some sushi next to me while I'm coding and just eat as I go. I'm sure the restaurants I go to are crap to real sushi-lovers, though. Especially since I'm fairly certain no one is getting beat in the kitchen, or having to wash rice for three years.
Actually the majority of them are Chinese or Korean (outside of Japan at least).
And the "wash rice for three years" thing is just a leftover from the way apprenticeship traditionally work here, whether it's for sushi or any other craft. It's always seemed to me like a particularly inefficient way of training someone and passing on your skills.
> [the white cook has] probably had to train a lot harder and knows a little bit more about what is actually going on then, let’s say, someone who can just land a sushi job just because he is Asian; in that sense, they literally bring nothing to the table besides being Asian.
On top of this, I find it troubling that diversity complaints and gender quotas are now apparently being aimed at legal/loved/admired cultural traditions. If Japanese sushi kitchens are mainly run by Japanese men...let them at it. What harm is it to you or anyone? As a white male, I don't expect that I'd be let become a geisha any time soon, and that seems fair enough to me...?
He's saying that people who had overcome institutional racism are better.
I don't think that he was talking about a white sushi chef from Kansas who have never been to Japan here.
He specifically says 'white'
Why should sushi restaurants lower their standards and let this white guy into their established restaurant, just for the sake of diversity? Sushi restaurants are all for equality, but we would never want them to lower their standards and serve lower quality food right? Also, if this white guy really wants to get in, he needs to change his culture. That laziness, loudness, and lack of respect for tradition will never get him anywhere in the sushi world.
It's an honest question, because I tried to understand what point are you trying to make in context of this post, and failed.