History Of Sushi!

The history of Sushi,

As you might have figured by now that Sushi is Japanese, …….no? Well you do now!

But even for those who have tried or never have, the history of cultural food is something we don’t come across often, even though we eat three times a day! Or more if we include our morning and afternoon snack! Oh, we cant forget about those 2 minutes noodles we have after we had enough of late night studying, right?

Chicken in Sushi..... Please.....

Anyway, today I am going to give you a brief history of Sushi, which you can ask your Japanese friends, (don't worry I will be your friend if you haven’t come across a Japanese friend) and they probably would not have a clue and reply back saying “Sumimasen”. But also you can think back it next time you are having sushi for a meal, that sushi has a great history of roughly 823~1221 years (Since Heian era).

Over the history, people have changed, culturally, mentally, with the looks. While everything changes around us, so as our diet. So Sushi too has changed its form throughout history. Sushi really become the form that we consume today in Muromachi era (1401~1573),

Yatai(Mobile Restaurant)

However, it was the cultural influence of Edo people (Tokyo) at the time, which dramatically changed the form of sushi today. Edo people were really fussy about time, so they wanted everything to be done quick!

2~3 times bigger!!!!

Just imaging Sushi like going to McDonald’s to get a meal and get going again. How many Sushi would you need to fill your self up, and think, most people walked everyday for miles on end, imagine if you were walking to another prefecture! So the original Sushi were recorded around 2~3 times bigger than what we see today. So Samurais would go

to a Yatai (mobile shop), grab E-Kan (1-set) of sushi and start his journey to another prefecture.

However, as Sushi become more available amongst the locals, they didn't want it to be as big, so they cut the E-Kan into 2, hence in Japan we often still call 1 Kan for 2 pieces of Sushi.

So next time you go to a Sushi restaurant, you can ask for E-Kan of Salmon or Tuna!

I will leave it there for today, there are a lot of historical information which I would need to write a book to cover, but if you want to know more, please comment below and I would make another post about it!

Sayonara!      

                             Iori Hashida