BAWDY LINE. No sushi without Tsukiji

Minato-ku, Tokyo

As Naomichi-san places the maguro (lean, vulgar tuna that is properly, labially, menstrually red, the flesh with all the squish and yield of the female breast) across the counter, you pick up on the idea that not a lot in Japanese food orthodoxy is left to happy accidents or unforced spontaneity. And this is plebeian food, a slice of raw fish on a clump of vinegar-ed rice. He then follows it up with a couple of anaemic white-fleshed fish, the flounder ( hirame ), and the sea bream ( tai ), brushed with the lightest glaze of soy. We’re seated at the ita (counter) and have ordered omakase. The root of that word means ‘to trust’ or ‘to submit’. It means that the procession of sushi served to us will be the chef’s choice. We’re leaving our meal to Naomichi-san’s discretion. It will be made one at a time in front of us and served immediately, like panipuri.

Edomae nigiri zushi (hand-pressed sushi) started its life in the early 19th century in the bay area of Edo (as Tokyo was known then; mae : in front of) as a post-coital meal for the spent Samurai as they emerged from the whoring quarters of Nihonbashi. In the pax Tokugawa, the Samurai class, military vassals of the Tokugawa shogunate, didn’t have much fighting to do and were starting to get a bit soft. By the 19th century they were reduced to being salaried bureaucrats who were required to leave their wives and families in their provincial fiefs and come to Edo on periodic tours of duty for a year or two. Edo, in the first quarter of 19th century, became a city of stipendiary single men and a badly skewed sex ratio. This, obviously, created a market for street food and prostitutes. Yohei’s pioneering sushi stall of early 19th century Nihonbashi, for desi equivalence, was the cultural analogue of Lucknow’s Tunday kababi.

Naomichi-san, the man in white across the ita , is called the itamae ; quite literally it means ‘in front of the cutting board’. He is a man with an unexcitingly typical Japanese habitus. In the making of sushi, in the performance of the ritual, he is doing and demonstrating Japaneseness. Though it is a kind of assemblage, it takes far more than rice and fish to make sushi. Each kind of raw fish has to be seasonal, sliced faultlessly and served at the peak of its flavour. Each grain of rice has to be firm and discrete and yet should contain enough cellulose to stick. But it should be sticky-moist with just the right amount of rice vinegar and mirin, and not sticky-slimy. Naomichi-san tells me that the aspirant itamae begins his apprenticeship as a teenager, straight out of high school, when he still has what is known as nyuanshin (a mind that is essentially malleable putty). His disposition has to form in the sushi-ya. There is no lateral entry after a graduate degree. A person entering the sushi trade with a pre-existing personality can never hope to become a master itamae . For the first couple of years, the apprentice ( minarau ) has to scrub the dishes and the knives. The aphorism about Japanese arts is that one learns not through instruction but by stealing the art from the master. The minarau’s first promotion is to the job of rough-cutting the fish — to separate those parts that never make it to the table. From there, it is a slow accretion of theory and praxis. After a year of rough-cutting, he is allowed to wash rice. It has to be done carefully, just enough washing to take off the dirt and the excess bran but not its whiff and savour. After six months of washing rice, he’s allowed to make it. Making short-grained koshihikari rice properly is, in a way, making Japan. Well-cooked rice is the epitome of culinary Japaneseness. Rice in Japan is eaten day after day, at every meal; white rice only, in its virginal state, not conjugated with any meat, fat, oil or spice, not sullied by any kind of curry. Rice grains were a form of currency in the pre-modern Japanese economy. They once ate so much of it, to the exclusion of everything else, that beriberi became the national disease. After a year of making rice, the minarau can move up to grilling the tamago (egg). A year of that and then he’s allowed the slicing of fish. The apotheosis of his career is not when he starts making sushi but when the itamae takes him along to Tsukiji market to buy fish. Itamae don’t buy from retail fishmongers, housewives do. Itamae go directly to the fount.

On the next morning, at five o’clock, I took my eight-year-old son to Tsukiji. Flanking the river Sumida, Tsukiji is Tokyo’s pantry and also the biggest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world. More than 700,000 metric tonnes of seafood worth about ¥600 billion are brought and traded here annually, all through tiny family businesses. About 900 trading firms are licensed to buy at the morning auctions and resell their purchases at the stalls. In its bustle, particularly in the huddle of the bluefin tuna auctions, one understands that Japan’s food culture is not just cooking and eating and the myriad abstract principles of cuisine. It also comes into being from the practical circumstances of the production and distribution of what we call food. Naomichi-san’s sushi is as much a product of his training and his facility as it is of the values of capitalism as a cultural order, of the long-established methods of Japanese mercantile life, of the political economy of the Japanese fishing industry, of the technologies of refrigeration, storage and distribution and the whole structure of retailing at Tsukiji. There can be no sushi without Tsukiji.

For the Japanese, raw, uncooked food is food. For other cultures, food means cooked food. The slice of raw fish pressed on the clump of rice is a highly crafted cultural artefact presented as food. If nations are imagined communities, then in its form nigiri zushi has all the elements to meet the visceral cravings of this imagined community: rice, fish and the umami of soy. Then again, Tunday kababi isn’t perhaps the right cultural analogue for desis. I actually don’t know what is. What kind of Hindustani street food has risen to its Epicurean meridian entirely on account of the freshness and worth of its ingredients and the rigour of its making? What kind of street food has been organised around the essential and essentialised traits of Hindustanis? It’ll have to be something to do with dairy, perhaps.

Ambarish Satwik is a Delhi-based vascular surgeon and writer

asatwik@gmail.com

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