The Story of Sushi by Trevor Corson Read Free Book Online Page B

movie star. She had cut short her film career and turned down offers from modeling agencies, and had come to L.A. to pursue her dream of becoming a sushi chef. She had graduated from the California Sushi Academy in March and was now a chef in training.
    After the chefs had reviewed the night’s specials, Toshi took over.
    “All right!” he bellowed in Japanese, his face stern. “You’re all going to work hard tonight!” He looked around the room. “Got it?”
    There were nods, a few sharp utterances of “Hai!”
    The restaurant manager shouted out the universal welcome. “Irasshaimase!”
    The staff yelled back in unison, “Irasshaimase!”
    The chefs and waitresses dispersed, and the manager propped the front door open for business.
    For two decades, Toshi’s restaurant in Venice Beach had been packed every night of the week. Movie stars had stopped in for dinner all the time, and they treated him like a buddy. Now, in Hermosa Beach, Toshi’s fortunes had taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Every day there seemed to be fewer customers, and the restaurant was hemorrhaging money.
    Toshi stared out the open door, his face impassive.

7
L.A. STORY
    T he first Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles opened about 1855, in the neighborhood that would become Little Tokyo. By the early 1900s, Little Tokyo bustled with shoppers, who patronized a number of Japanese food establishments.
    But few of America’s Japanese immigrants ate in Japanese restaurants. By 1910, more than 40,000 Japanese migrant laborers were toiling on American farms, along with another 10,000 on railroads and several thousand more in canneries. The farm workers often survived by drinking the water in the irrigation ditches and eating the grapes and strawberries in the fields, perhaps supplemented by a dinner of flour dumplings in salt soup if they were lucky. The closest the railroad workers got to fine dining was a monthly visit to town to buy a bottle of bourbon, a can of salmon, and some rice. Nostalgic for home, they’d squeeze together what they considered “extravagant” rice balls and cover them with slices of fish.
    By 1940, Japanese immigrant farmers were growing 95 percent of California’s snap beans and celery, nearly 70 percent of its tomatoes, and around 40 percent of its onions and green peas. They owned many of the produce stalls in L.A.’s city market.
    But discrimination against the Japanese made it difficult for them to enter other businesses. One option was importing Japanese foodstuffs and selling them to other Japanese in the UnitedStates. People called this the “homesickness trade.” In L.A., a group of these importers formed an organization called the Mutual Trading Company.
    Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor interrupted the homesickness trade. The U.S. government locked up Japanese Americans in internment camps. A group of Catholic nuns in downtown L.A. protected the Mutual Trading Company’s warehouse stock until the end of the war.
    After the war, a man named Noritoshi Kanai joined Mutual Trading and decided that to survive as a business, the company would have to sell products that average Americans would buy.
    In the early 1960s, Kanai traveled back and forth between Japan and America in search of products to sell to Americans. He tried importing canned snake meat, chocolate-covered ants, and a type of biscuit. The last went over well, but was immediately imitated. On one of his trips to Japan, Kanai took along an American business partner named Harry Wolf. After an unsuccessful day of scouting, Kanai was hungry for a meal at a traditional sushi bar. Wolf tagged along.
    Wolf told Kanai he’d never experienced anything so delicious. Every day for the next week, Wolf returned to the same sushi bar. For Kanai, it was an epiphany. He decided to make “the East Asian food that most disgusted white people,” as he put it later, the core of his new business.
    Back in L.A., Kanai did everything in his power to launch proper,