Sushi: a fermented fish that became a street snack, a conveyor belt, and the most expensive meal in Japan

Sushi is the Japanese dish the world thinks it knows, and the one Japan itself argues about most. Tokyo means a hand-pressed nigiri at a counter; Osaka means fish pressed on rice in a wooden box; Shiga means a carp fermented for two years that smells like cheese; most of the country, most of the time, means a plate going past on a belt for ¥110. All of them are sushi. What they share is not raw fish — most sushi for most of its history has not been raw — but sour rice.

What it is

The word covers a thousand years. The oldest form, narezushi, was a way of keeping fish: salted and packed in cooked rice, it fermented for months or years until the rice was a sour paste that was scraped off and thrown away. The agriculture ministry traces the method to the rice-growing uplands of South-East Asia and says it arrived with rice farming; Shiga’s funazushi, crucian carp from Lake Biwa fermented until the bones go soft, is the surviving example, and still goes to shrines as an offering and to the sick as a remedy. In the Muromachi period people shortened the ferment to a few months and started eating the rice too — namanare — and that sour rice is the ancestor of everything on this page.

Edo did the rest. By the National Diet Library’s account, fermented sushi was on sale in the city in the late seventeenth century, vinegar replaced fermentation in the 1750s (hayazushi, “quick sushi”), and at some point before the 1820s somebody took the portion of a pressed box-sushi and shaped it by hand instead. That is nigiri. The Morisada Mankō, a mid-1800s record of city life, says Edo had by then gone over entirely to hand-pressed sushi while Kyoto and Osaka stayed with the pressed box — a split that holds today.

The characters are a separate argument. Sushi can be written 鮨, 鮓 or 寿司; the library’s reference desk notes that the last is a later phonetic flourish and the first two are old Chinese words for fermented fish, and that the spelling tends to follow the region and the type. The trade body, founded in 1961 with some 5,000 member shops, writes it in plain kana and declares 1 November Sushi Day.

Why it is the way it is

The counter is a stall that stopped moving. Edo nigiri was street food, sold from stalls at a mon or two a piece; the ministry notes that when the stalls became shops they kept the counter, and the chef kept making each piece in front of the customer. The portion was different — the rice ball was about three times today’s, a snack to fill the stomach rather than a frame for the fish.

“Raw” is the exception, historically. Edo had no refrigeration and a bay full of fish that spoiled fast, so the craft was the shigoto, the “work”: curing gizzard shad in vinegar, simmering conger eel, marinating tuna in soy, steaming prawn. Fatty tuna belly was disliked and fed to cats; the word toro for it is said to date from a Nihonbashi shop in the 1920s. Osaka’s box sushi takes the same logic further — the fish is marinated so thoroughly that no soy sauce is needed at the table.

The belt made it everyday. In 1958 a shop owner in Higashi-Ōsaka, who had watched beer bottles ride a conveyor at a brewery, opened the first “revolving” sushi shop; he patented the belt in 1962 and the patent ran out in 1978, after which the format spread to every suburb in Japan. Four chains now run more than 2,400 shops in Japan and the industry body counts more than 4,000 in all. The health ministry’s own summary of the trade is a split market: expensive counters on one side, cheap belts on the other, and the mid-priced neighbourhood sushi shop disappearing between them.

The fish has rules. Packaged fish for raw eating must be labelled as such, and the health ministry’s advice on anisakis — the parasite that caused 330 of Japan’s 1,037 recorded food-poisoning cases in 2024 — is that vinegar, salt, soy sauce and wasabi do not kill it; freezing at −20 °C for 24 hours or heating to 70 °C does. The cured and frozen fish of a modern sushi shop is safer than the romance of “fresh” suggests.

What it costs

The spread is the widest of any dish on this site, and it is three different meals:

• The plate. ¥110–150 for the cheapest plate of two pieces at Kura, Hama or Sushiro, ¥20–30 more at their city-centre branches; the government survey prices two pieces of conveyor-belt tuna in central Tokyo at ¥241. A full meal averages 9.9 plates and about ¥2,000 per head, by the industry’s 2026 consumer survey.
• The set. At a sit-down shop, lunch is the bargain: Sushizanmai’s weekday sets run ¥1,188–2,530 and its regular nigiri sets ¥3,828–5,478 all day; Yoshino-zushi in Nihonbashi, open since 1879, lists lunch nigiri at ¥2,750–3,850 and evening nigiri from ¥4,950.
• The counter. An omakase evening at a reputable counter starts around ¥16,500 (Yoshino-zushi’s stated budget) and runs to ¥19,800–20,000 at the shops Kanazawa’s tourism office lists. There is no ceiling, and the menu often says jika — market price — rather than a number. Ask before you order; Japanese customers do.

And the city that eats the most of it is not Tokyo. In the household survey, Kanazawa spends ¥22,406 a year per household on sushi eaten out, Toyama ¥21,750, Nagoya ¥21,079; Tokyo is 11th at ¥18,603, Osaka 23rd, Fukuoka 48th. The Sea of Japan coast, with its winter fish, is sushi country.

The lineages

Where to eat it

• Edomae — Tokyo’s old houses (Nihonbashi, Ginza, Tsukiji); the Toyosu market’s restaurant row opens at five in the morning, and the tuna auction can be watched by advance lottery.
• Kaiten — any suburb; the chains’ city-centre shops are dearer and the industry’s own respondents say the best belts to travel for are in Hokkaido, Ishikawa and Toyama.
• Osaka — Senba’s box-sushi houses and the take-away battera counters at the stations.
• The Sea of Japan — Kanazawa for nigiri, Toyama for pressed trout, Shiga for the fermented original.

What people get wrong

• “Sushi means raw fish.” It means vinegared rice. The oldest sushi is fermented, the Osaka kind is marinated and pressed, and the Edo craft was curing.
• “The conveyor belt is a tourist thing.” It is where Japan eats sushi — 4,000 shops, and 65% of people who eat sushi out eat it there.
• “Tokyo is the sushi capital.” Tokyo made nigiri. Kanazawa eats it most.
• “Fresh is best.” Cured, aged and frozen is how the trade has always handled a fish that spoils in hours and carries a parasite that soy sauce does not kill.
• “It is all the same abroad.” The agriculture ministry counts about 181,000 Japanese restaurants outside Japan; JETRO’s history of the American market is that sushi arrived there as the California roll, built for customers who would not eat raw fish, and only later grew toward the Edo repertoire.