13
Jan
Lunch with Master Sushi Chef Shigeo Mori
Topic: Japan 2007
|
|
A few days after we arrived, we had lunch with Master Sushi Chef Shigeo Mori at his restaurant in Taito-ku. He’s the Chairman of the All Japan Sushi Association. Our inside connection was Masako Hamada, who works with Maria at Villanova - at her invitation he gave a presentation at Villanova (PDF) last spring. He also regularly gives presentations at US Cherry Blossom festivals. Masako is currently in Tokyo as well, so she brought us to his restaurant.
It probably won’t come as a surprise to hear me say it was some of the best sushi I’ve ever had. He also gave us a lesson on the proper technique for eating sushi. You’re supposed to turn the sushi on its side with your chopsticks, leaving it still on the geta (the wooden serving tray - this is also the word for the old style Japanese clogs, as the serving tray looks like the clogs). Then you dip just a corner in the soy sauce - mostly just the fish side but a little of the rice as well.
He told us some stories after lunch, but it was all in Japanese so I couldn’t follow most of it. Maria passed along that he was trained to be a kamikaze pilot in WWII, but a B-29 bombed his plane on the airfield, so (luckily for him), he never got off the ground.
I Googled him and found an interesting article describing one of his talks (PDF). Here’s a portion of it:
Mr. Mori also addressed the “sushi crisis” that came after General MacArthur’s ban. “Sushi masters went to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government and in 1947, a new regulation was put into effect,” he said. Customers were to bring single cups of rice to be cooked on the spot, and what could be more fresh and sanitary than just-cooked rice? From that came today’s tradition of ordering ten pieces of sushi - just the amount that one cup of rice can make.
Mr. Mori ended his talk by saying how pleased he is that Americans have taken to sushi with such fervor. “I will be forever grateful,” he said, laughing, “for the invention of the California roll.”
Print
