The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 21 (2010)

Imagining the Taste:
Transnational Food Exchanges
between Japan and the United States

Iris-Aya LAEMMERHIRT*INTRODUCTION
The omnipresence of American brands and consumer products inJapan has triggered an avalanche of writing on different aspects of thecross-cultural relationship between Japan and the United States. Whenever cultural interactions between East and West take place, they are frequently accompanied by the term “globalization,” a word often equatedwith cultural homogenization and “cultural imperialism.” According to
the critical theorist John Tomlinson, cultural imperialism is a term that“constrains the negatively marked notions of power, domination, or control.”1 On closer scrutiny, both of these concepts are often hasty oversimpliﬁcations, given the contemporary cultural interaction that exists
between Japan and the United States. Although economic power relations still play a role, processes of cultural exchange are complex andinconsistent, and they frequently meet resistance.
Cultural imperialism, deﬁned by Edward Said as practices and attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory, is aproblematic concept when applied to East–West relationships, since it

Copyright © 2010 Iris-Aya Laemmerhirt. All rights reserved. This work may be used, withthis notice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed, electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.
*Lecturer, Technische Universität Dortmund

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ignores that commodities cannot simply be imposed on consumers.2
Instead, consumers actively respond to new inﬂuences, and thus, in order
to ﬁt local consumer tastes, negotiations have to take place; imported
commodities are creatively recontextualized at national, regional, andlocal sites. By merging and converging foreign and familiar elements
new hybrid transnational commodities are produced that can no longer
be understood with an interpretative grid based on processes of culturalimperialism and homogenization. Instead of focusing on ideas of cultural homogenization, scholars such as social theorist Arjun Appadurai
welcome communication, media, mass migration, and cultural interactions as enabling sites where local negotiations take place and create newcultural forms,3 making hybridization rather than homogenization aprocess of globalization. In this context, theories of transnationalism andtransculturalization offer new ways of thinking, of imagining cultural
relationships in the twenty-ﬁrst century. These approaches encourage areexamination of concepts such as national identity by challenging traditional perceptions of the self and the Other.
One example of such a transnational cultural exchange is the introduction of Japanese food in general and sushi in particular into the UnitedStates. Food and the practice of eating and cooking characterize all cultures and help make them unique, distinguishing them from one another.
As food scholar Warren Belasco states in his essay “Food Matters: Perspectives on an Emerging Field,” food is often an indicator of “who weare, where we come from, and what we want to be.”4 In a globally interconnected world, characterized by increasing transnational mass migration and tourism, the frequent ﬂow of people brings a frequent ﬂow offood to different places. Today, people are exposed to a kaleidoscopic
ﬂux of dishes from all over the world, and food from many different
countries is available in restaurants and supermarkets.
However, cultural interconnectedness and the spread of different
dishes does not lead to the decline of local cuisines and thus to a homogenization of food cultures. Instead, “new hybrid cuisines are created and
new identities embraced through the acceptance and rejection of newcommodities and new forms of consumption.”5 In most cases, the unknown food is not consumed and accepted in its original state but is modiﬁed in order to please the local palate; modern eating today is more often
than not “compromised, globalized, creolized.”6 Dishes are modiﬁed
according to the availability of ingredients or their tastes, and, therefore,
the majority of dishes in cookbooks and restaurants with a supposedly
foreign origin are “rather products of the imagination of their creators.”7

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Appadurai has discussed such inﬂuences of the imagination in our global
present and argues that “the imagination is now central to all forms ofagency, is itself a social fact, and is the key component of the new global
order.”8 Appadurai’s statement implies that the imagination can be used
as a positive force to imagine alternative modes of viewing the world,
without falling back on binary categories of the self and the Other as utilized in Orientalist approaches.
In this essay I elucidate how Japanese food is reimagined in the UnitedStates and how it is embedded in and adapted to local tastes. To contradict notions of culinary colonialism or Orientalizing processes resulting
from the creation of new sushi rolls today, I argue that Japanese food in
general and sushi in particular participate in a transnational exchange,
thereby communicating across culinary and national boundaries. Consumers decide what kind of sushi they want, and therefore they determine
the popularity of the dish. Sushi is not produced by a single company but
by multiple sushi chefs from all around the world, who put their individual touch to the dish. Sushi—once a traditional Japanese dish—nowadays travels from Japan to the United States, is modiﬁed according to
the American palate, and reenters the Japanese market as Americansushi. Nowadays, both the cultures of Japan and the United States takepart in a cross-cultural culinary exchange and redeﬁne the idea of sushi
without exoticizing the dish.
I.

EARLY ENCOUNTERS AND FOOD EXCHANGESThat people are exposed to a greater variety of cuisines today does notnecessarily mean that consumers are automatically more open and lessprejudiced vis-à-vis unknown dishes. According to food writer Leslie
Brenner, “we’re suspicious of food . . . because we learn to be suspiciousof food,”9 by which she means that we are taught that some foods are notpalatable and that certain tastes do not ﬁt our idea of what is food. Thus,
cultural exchanges in the past and today were and often still are accompanied by clashes and misunderstandings over food. Clashes over foodoccurred in the initial contact between Japan and the United States, whenearly diplomatic exchanges started between the two nations in the nineteenth-century and diplomats from both sides of the Paciﬁc reported on
the different eating habits.
The travel account written by Samuel Wells Williams, the chief interpreter of the 1854 trip of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry to Japan,
reports his unsettling culinary encounter with Japan. During the voyage,

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Williams recorded all events in his diary, among them an invitation to a
Japanese dinner that failed to meet American expectations. They wereserved tea, sponge cake, raw oysters, mushroom soup, seaweed cookedwith sugar and raw ginger, among “other unknown matters,”10 none ofwhich was considered very delicious by the Americans. Japanese diplomats had similar disconcerting food experiences in the Unites States.
During the ﬁrst voyage of Japanese diplomats to the United States onan American ship, food was a permanent source of worry for the Japanese
travelers, who were not able to cope with the Western diet based on
wheat, meat, and dairy products. Wary of the strange food and eating
habits of the Americans, which they had observed when the Americans
visited Japan, the Japanese had taken ﬁsh and soy sauce with them on
the ship. The American sailors, however, threw the unknown Japanesefood overboard, since they believed that it was tainted and poisonous.
With the familiar food gone, the Japanese had no alternative but to eat
bread, meat, and cheese for the rest of the voyage.11 One of the Japaneseofﬁcials lamented that “it is well beyond the power of my pen to describe
what we, the Japanese, suffer on our journey to a foreign country,”12
referring to his experience with American food.
Williams’s diary entry as well as the Japanese diplomat’s comment
on Western food reveal a mutual inability to accept the unfamiliar dishes
and to appreciate the hospitality and culinary culture of the other.
Indeed, although some Western food was introduced to Japan in thenineteenth century, Japanese people clearly differentiated themselvesfrom the West by strictly distinguishing Japanese cuisine from Westerncuisine. Due to Buddhist traditions, meat was widely believed to be
impure, and as a consequence eating meat was considered barbaric.13
Moreover, before the arrival of Westerners, the term nanban ryôori,which can be translated as “southern barbarian cuisine,” was used inJapan for non-Japanese Western dishes. The term reveals that although
Western food was accepted, the Japanese still considered their food culture more civilized and consequently superior to that of Westerners.14
Similarly, Americans differentiated themselves in terms of food fromJapan by setting up their own binaries of their civilized selves against
uncivilized others. American standards were applied to differentiate
between the civilized and uncivilized, between “us” and “them.” Such
attitudes toward the “other” food resonate with the anthropologist
Claude Lévi-Strauss’s conceptualization of inclusion and exclusion via
the cooked and the raw.

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In the 1970s Lévi-Strauss expounded the idea that food was not only
important in terms of nourishment but also of great cultural importance.
Different cultures have different, sometimes even diametrically opposed, rules about how food has to be prepared, served, and consumed.
The notion of what is considered edible and therefore food and what isdeemed inedible varies; by classifying food into categories of edible andinedible, a binary is created. Lévi-Strauss classiﬁed different forms offood preparation, relating them to the idea of civilization and “barbarism.” Using the concept of the “raw” versus the “cooked” he set up
a dichotomy of the uncivilized natural and the civilized cultural. According to his deﬁnition, ingredients only become a dish, and thus part of culture, when they are cooked.15
The creation of an uncivilized Orient, according to the Western imagination and on the basis of Western normative ideologies, helped toreinforce the allegedly superior position of Western nations, since to themajority of Westerners, Japanese food not only seems “raw” but also
inedible. Yet, this Western deﬁnition of civilized or uncivilized foodcollides with Japanese conceptions, since for them “raw or uncooked
food is food, while in other cultures food usually means cooked food.”16
Disregarding the difference in Japanese culinary culture, in the West,
Western eating practices are set up as a norm, according to which everything that does not ﬁt is seen as strange and suspicious.
In the West, Japanese food has been frequently associated with sushi,
thus simplifying and reducing Japanese culinary culture to the consumption of raw ﬁsh. By imagining Japanese food to be exclusively raw ﬁsh,and thereby imagining Japan to have a monolithic, supposedly uncivilized food culture, a stereotypical Orientalist discourse of the Other iscreated by differentiating the West or the United States from Japan interms of food.
II.

CULINARY COLONIALISM AND ORIENTALIZING VIA FOOD

The ﬁeld of postcolonial studies explains that weaker nations in thepast were dominated economically, politically, and culturally by colonizing nations. Based on the belief that the morals of the Western colonizing nations were superior to those of the colonized, colonialist nations
believed it was their duty to help civilize and enlighten other nations. In
order to justify their interference, colonialists created an imaginary
Orient, which was deﬁned as less developed and less civilized than the236

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West. Edward Said argued that in Orientalist discourses Europeans
constructed an Orient according to their imagination, thereby deﬁning
and having power over it, while at the same time denying “Orientals”
agency to represent themselves. By labeling a certain geographical space“the Orient,” different Asian cultures were mixed together, essentialized,
and stripped of their individuality, thereby becoming one homogenous
mass under one umbrella term. Moreover, by creating a binary opposition with an Oriental Other that was considered inferior and almost
childlike in contrast to an enlightened and mature Occidental self,“Orientalism was ultimately a political vision of reality whose structure
promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, “us”)
and the strange (the Orient, the East, “them”).17 According to this imaginary power relation, in which a dominant West represents a passive East,
the Orient was used as a counterpart against which the dominant West
could deﬁne itself. This allegedly superior position in regard to civilization of Western nations was used to justify their colonizing mission in
the East.18
The Orient, an unknown and exotic place, has always fascinated Westerners, as it promised to be a place of exotic adventure. Yearning for the
mysterious, exotic, and unknown, many middle- and upper-class people
in the West collected Oriental art in the late nineteenth century. Today
many people are said to participate in a gastronomic form of Orientalism,in which they act as culinary colonialists by deciding what is to be considered “Oriental food.”
Consumers are often curious about new, unknown dishes because they
promise to be different from the mainstream food and thus interesting.
Like other “exotic” commodities, food that seems to be different fromthe known attracts people exactly because of its difference from thenorm. African American feminist Bell Hooks criticizes that “within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning, that can liven up thedull dish that is mainstream white culture.”19 The image of Oriental foodbeing special and exotic is used by chefs in restaurants who, for example, create a Salade Orientale to gain the interest of their guests. A Salade
Orientale is a salad made with shrimp, crabmeat, white wine, celery,onion, and cucumber and rice.20 The only “Oriental” aspect of it is the
addition of rice, since usually this ingredient is not added to salads. Riceis further closely associated with the East and therefore seems to be amarker of “the Orient.” Furthermore, the name of the dish can evoke theidea that this is a salad as consumed by “Orientals,” who, according toIMAGINING THE TASTE

237

Western deﬁnitions of what a salad is, might have the uncommon idea
to add rice to salad. Similarly, in 2003, McDonald’s added Asian Chicken Salad to its menu in the United States in order to satisfy the consumer
demand for healthy food. The salad is marketed ﬁrst and foremost as an
exotic and healthy alternative to hamburgers and french fries. On therestaurant chain’s ofﬁcial homepage, McDonald’s gave a detailed description of the dish: “A harmonious blend of crisp greens, warmorangeglazed chicken (grilled or crispy), snow peas, edamame, mandarinoranges and toasted almonds. Add the Newman’s Own Low Fat Sesame
Ginger Dressing and we’re talking pure inspiration.”21 Most of the listed
ingredients are selected for their association with the East. Yet they represent different nations in Asia, as, for example, mandarin oranges, associated with China, or edamame from Japan. These different ingredientsare tossed together, thereby creating an Oriental salad that is different
from Western salads. Additionally, the notion of a “harmonious blend”
and words such as “crisp greens” emphasize the idea that this salad is
fresh and healthy. In order to add a mysterious touch to the salad, more
uncommon ingredients such as snow peas and edamame are used. The
slogan associated with the Asian Chicken Salad, “Seek Flavor, Find
Harmony,”22 further evokes the idea of ﬁnding harmony via food, alluding to the Asian concept of Zen. The Asian Chicken Salad elicits curiosity in the potential consumer and promises to be an ideal way to relievea person from the stress of a hectic workday. Some ingredients such as
chicken and greens are used to reassure the consumer and provide him
or her with some familiar aspects of a salad.
This menu item not only promises to be a healthy food choice, but it
also suggests up-to-dateness and a touch of modernity with its Asian ingredients, since nowadays, Asian philosophy, anime, martial arts, Asian
perfumes, and clothing styles are in vogue in the West. McDonald’s
employs old images and stereotypes of the Orient in order to sell a new
product, thereby presenting consumers with an uncommon salad in a
familiar American fast food restaurant. The Asian Chicken Salad istherefore an Oriental dish, constructed and imagined by Americans for
American consumers.
The release of the Asian Chicken Salad by McDonald’s shows how“exotic” commodities are desired by consumers because they are new
and unusual and also healthy. Familiar dishes such as salads arepresented in what people might consider new ways, and these unusual
dishes challenge people to experiment.

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IRIS-AYA LAEMMERHIRTHenry Yu explains in Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, andExoticism in Modern America how an Orientalist discourse emerged in
the United States when merchants and missionaries sailed to Asia.
According to him, collecting and mastering knowledge of the Orient
became “a fetish for elite white men and women,” since the Orient represented “the adventure of the exotic” and “was the opposite of everything uninteresting in their own lives.”23
In a similar vein, Lisa Heldke in Exotic Appetites calls the preparationand consumption of ethnic food dishes, mainly those of so-called Third
World countries, “food colonialism.”24 She argues that the choice to eat
unusual food is often “strongly motivated by an attitude with deep connections to Western colonialism.”25 Even when consumers endeavor tobe respectful toward other cultures and their cuisine, according to
Heldke, they are not likely to overcome their colonial culinary attitude.
She further accuses consumers who experiment with foreign ingredientsof seeing other cultures merely as “raw materials to serve their own interest” and claims that such people are less likely to be interested in the cuisine of another culture.26
However, despite people being exposed to and having access to a great
variety of new ﬂavors, this does not necessarily mean that people areobsessive about exotic food and thereby indifferent to the original cultural context of the dish, as Heldke suggests. Instead, the interest in newdishes can signify an openness to other culinary cultures. Lucy Long thus
suggests using the term “culinary tourism” instead.27 Her choice of terminology seems to be more appropriate, since culinary tourism is “aboutfood as subject and medium, destination and vehicle, for tourism. It is
about individuals exploring foods new to them as well as using food to
explore new cultures and ways of being.”28 This approach takes into consideration that people are acting voluntarily and assumes that therefore
they are open to an unknown cuisine.29 Indeed, some culinary tourists
may have colonialist attitudes, yet by choosing to take part in a new cultural or culinary experience, they show an openness toward different(eating) cultures. Unlike culinary colonialists who “regard culture not asa culture in the full sense . . . but as a source of materials to be extracted
and used to enhance our own cultures,”30 culinary tourists are interested
in different cultures and their culinary heritage. Culinary colonialists, on
the other hand, think of their food culture and eating habits as the universal standard against which other food cultures are measured. They
seldom question their own habits but tend to think of deviant culinary

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customs as the Other. Quite differently, culinary tourists use food as acontact zone with other cultures and do not categorize food that is unknown to them as “strange.”
When talking about the inﬂuence of Japanese food in the UnitedStates, the idea of culinary colonialism or Orientalism seems inappropriate as well. Most American consumers of Japanese food are curious
culinary tourists within their own country, interested in new dishes.
Some of them are keen on the ﬂavors or want to express their status insociety, but they do not intend to take part in a form of gastronomical
Orientalism. By choosing to consume a culturally different dish such as
sushi, these consumers openly engage in a culinary dialogue and thereby
cross personal culinary boundaries.
III.

CONSUMING SUSHI IN THE UNITED STATESThat “the discovery of any food system starts with the shock of theunknown as it crosses one’s sensory facilities” was certainly true for the
introduction of sushi into the United States.31 Among all dishes andJapanese ﬂavors that have seeped into the American culinary landscape,sushi was probably the most challenging, as it implied the consumptionof raw ﬁsh. Sushi, once seen as the epitome of the strangeness andotherness of Japanese food, entered the United States at the end of the
1950s. The ﬁrst Japanese restaurants serving sushi were opened in the
1960s by Japanese expatriates for Japanese businessmen. However,despite the growing number of Japanese restaurants, many Americans
were still inclined to believe that the consumption of raw ﬁsh was a signof a lack of culinary skill and considered unhygienic and unsafe, anddishes such as teriyaki, tempura, and sukiyaki were sometimes consumed by Americans rather than sushi or sashimi. Although the idea ofsushi being raw ﬁsh dominated the perceptions of Americans, raw ﬁsh
is not the only ingredient used in making sushi, as vegetables are also
included. Additionally, most of the ﬁsh used for sushi is prepared in someway, either by being smoked, salted, or pickled and thus cannot be considered to be “raw” in the sense used by Lévi-Strauss. It turns out thatthe main obstacle to consuming sushi for Westerners is only the idea of
eating raw ﬁsh.
With a raising health consciousness in the United States during thelate 1970s and 1980s, American interest in sushi rose, as health experts
started to promote “the beneﬁts of omega-3 fatty acids, abundant in240

IRIS-AYA LAEMMERHIRT

ﬁsh.”32 Japanese cuisine, which mainly does use ﬁsh, fresh vegetables,and soy products rather than meat, sugar, or dairy products, was seen as
the reason why Japanese people have the lowest level of obesity andlongest life expectancy in the world.33 Japanese food became increasingly popular among American consumers. Light food became preferred
to dishes using heavy sauces or red meat, turning sushi into “a diet foodwith social cost,”34 thus turning the dish into a prestigious diet. With therise of the popularity of Japanese food as health food, sushi became asigniﬁer of class and status, thereby turning from “an exotic, almost
unpalatable ethnic speciality . . . to haut cuisine of the most reﬁned
sort.”35
The supposed healthiness of sushi thus has helped to raise Americaninterest in the dish, but the idea that consuming sushi was sophisticatedand a marker of class further fueled its popularity. The fact that sushi
was at ﬁrst expensive and served only as a luxury made it easier to convince American consumers that the dish was indeed a culinary delight.
Unknown dishes sometimes indicate aspects of class, since uncommon
dishes with ingredients that are hard to get are considered a luxury, available only for those who can afford to pay the price. By consuming theseexclusive foods, “desirable because of their foreign origin,”36 status andwealth were expressed in the 1980s and 1990s.
Today, the consumption of sushi is part of American everyday life,
and it is widely considered stylish to eat sushi. What started in the 1950s
as a foreign dish has developed into a part of American mainstream foodculture. The availability of sushi in American supermarkets further familiarized the formerly “exotic” dish by putting it into a familiar context
and making it affordable. It became increasingly fashionable to combine
different ingredients and cooking styles in new ways and to create
thereby new Western versions of the dish without completely erasing theJapanese feeling. Globalizing processes made sushi widely available,
especially in the United States and Europe, and the sushi economy contributed to an intercultural exchange that still continues.37
In order to familiarize sushi and make it appealing to a broader Western consumer audience, many new Western sushi versions were created
and became part of the so-called California cuisine, which puts greatemphasis on the use of fresh seasonal local ingredients such as avocado
and at the same time embraces Asian and Mediterranean inﬂuences. The
idea of this kind of fusion cooking is to bring different ingredients andcooking styles together. The result can be called trans-Paciﬁc, transcon-

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tinental, or transnational. These new culinary creations not only crossnational borders but culinary borders as well, creating new, hybrid eating experiences without Orientalizing the dish.
The main focus and appeal of these dishes is the emphasis on differences: different ingredients from different cultural backgrounds areconsciously combined in new, daring ways. Dishes containing unknown
ingredients or unusual usage of well-known ingredients are especiallyinteresting to those Western consumers who want to have new culinary
experiences in a safe and familiar environment. These new creations are
no longer part of a speciﬁc national cuisine but are a hybrid mix of Western and Eastern eating cultures. American sushi is one popular example
of fusion cuisine.
With Japanese food and sushi becoming chic, a great number of sushi
cookbooks and food guides, such as Sushi for Dummies, The Connoisseur’s Guide to Sushi, and The Encyclopedia of Sushi Rolls, ﬂooded
the market, with the aim of explaining and reinterpreting the dish forWestern consumers.38
IV.

AMERICAN SUSHI COOKBOOKS

Since the late 1990s, a shift to promote the Japanese diet in generaland sushi in particular as fancy food for stylish parties and as a supposedly healthy alternative to heavy meat dishes has taken place in the
United States. Sushi in contemporary cookbooks no longer is positioned
among other non-Western dishes but has become, in the form ofAmerican sushi, part of Western cuisine. One example of a contemporary sushi cookbook is Sushi for Dummies, one book in a series of simpliﬁed instruction books, that explains the basics of sushi, dispelling the“huge misconception that sushi means raw ﬁsh, when it really means
vinegared rice.”39 The authors, Judi Strada and Mineko Takane Moreno,ﬁrst introduce traditional Japanese sushi but then focus on recipes forﬁshless varieties. Using ingredients such as avocado, hot chili sauce,
mayonnaise, sweet barbecue sauce, and mango they provide a familiar
Western context and further assure their readers that making sushi is easy
and that preparing sushi will soon become as second nature to every
American as “building a cheeseburger.”40 Strada and Moreno explainthat there exist many different types of sushi today and that the origin of
most of these variations cannot be traced anymore.41 They do not restrictsushi to the Japanese version but instead recommend using leftovers to242

IRIS-AYA LAEMMERHIRT

make sushi by “using what’s on hand.”42 Expanding the opportunities toserve sushi in the United States, the authors include a selection of “glamorous sushi” for parties with sushi variations in matching colors and arecipe for a birthday cake sushi. With their innovative and sometimes
daring recipes, the authors make sushi a less expensive and exclusive
food than that which is primarily consumed in restaurants. Instead, they
promote it as a fashionable party food as well as an everyday food, easy
to prepare at home by anyone.
Tracy Grifﬁth takes a similar approach in her cookbook, Sushi American
Style. She focuses on the preparation of sushi without the use of raw ﬁshin order to offer alternatives for those who would like to try sushi but
still feel wary of eating “raw” ﬁsh. She presents a vast variety of sushi
rolls. Her rolls, such as the “Thanksgiving roll,” which contains turkey
and sweet cranberries, perfectly blend in with American dining habits.
She further proposes sushi rolls for “Monday night football gatherings”
to be served alongside potato chips and beer,43 thereby suggesting a newuse of sushi for typical American family gatherings as well as national
American holidays. Following her credo that “whatever you roll up withthis [seasoned rice], you are making sushi,”44 she recommends, like
Strada and Moreno, the usage of leftovers. To meet the craving of many
Americans for a sweet dessert, she also offers recipes for American sweet
sushi rolls, such as the “Elvis roll” made with peanut butter and bananas,
which thus resembles Elvis Presley’s favorite sandwich.
Most recipes in Grifﬁth’s book have little in common with the original preparation of Japanese sushi and clearly give the dish more than an
American twist. She meets the demand of American consumers who prefer the American versions of sushi to the original and embeds this dishin American culture.
When comparing American sushi rolls to Japanese sushi rolls, it isevident that the ingredients used are culturally and locally speciﬁc. Not
only are the ingredients changed for the American market, but the rolls
are given names such as Boston roll, Crazy Horse, Happy sumo, orTokyo sunrise. These names position the rolls within a familiar
American context by referring to American cities (Boston roll, Seattleroll, Philadelphia roll) or by using names that are reminiscent of Native
Americans (Crazy Horse). Other names allude to the Japanese roots(Happy sumo, Tokyo sunrise), hinting at the Japanese origin of the dish.
These cookbooks show that the Japanese dish is neither imposed on
American food culture nor is it turned into a fetishized Oriental dish by

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the sushi chefs, as these chefs come from different cultural backgrounds,
including Japan. Instead, American sushi needs to be understood as atransnational version of sushi, which imagines this dish differently without rendering it “exotic” or strange.
In addition to these books, the California Sushi Academy as an institution has helped to integrate sushi into the American culinary landscapeand educated non-Japanese sushi chefs.
V.

THE CALIFORNIA SUSHI ACADEMYFounded in 1998 by Toshi Sugiura, the California Sushi Academy in
Los Angeles offers various sushi classes for anyone who is interested in
the preparation of the dish. Sugiura, the “pioneer of American Sushi,”45
realized that the rising demand for sushi would lead to a need for moresushi chefs. Many fusion restaurants wanted to proﬁt from offering sushi
on their menus. Sugiura concluded that the traditional Japanese education of a sushi chef, which is based on a long apprenticeship, takes toomuch time and that it would make sense to train new sushi chefs in only
a few months. For him, the education of sushi chefs in a short time is alogical consequence of the sushi boom in the United States and necessary in order to secure a good reputation for sushi. He observed how anincreasing number of untrained chefs started to produce sushi on theirown, often lacking the most basic knowledge about hygiene and proper
techniques. Many of his fellow Japanese sushi chefs, who are very protective about their profession, disliked the idea of introducing nonJapanese chefs to the world of sushi, and some of them even consider
Sugiura to be a traitor.46 These traditional sushi chefs reinforce theboundary between original Japanese sushi preparation techniques andthe new American sushi as taught by the California Sushi Academy.
Sugiura, however, is convinced that “America had already embraced
sushi, and it would be foolish not to train American chefs.”47 At the
California Sushi Academy students are taught how to prepare traditional
Japanese sushi, the proper use of Japanese cooking utensils, and themeaning and history of Japanese food. Additionally, since most of thegraduates are likely to work in the United States, the academy also
encourages students to create their own American rolls.
Sushi rolls are the most popular version of sushi in the United States,and “most sushi rolls in America have never been served in Japan.”48
The best example of such a popular American roll is the famous California

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IRIS-AYA LAEMMERHIRT

roll. Invented by Ichirô Mashita in the 1960s in Los Angeles, it has
become synonymous with sushi in the West. Although the roll turned
out to be a tremendous success, it was not consciously invented to offer
Westerners a roll without ﬁsh. Chef Mashita once had problems with histuna supply, and so he substituted the readily available avocado for theﬁsh, as a fatty fruit that has a similar texture in the mouth as tuna.49 Even
though it was not ﬁrst and foremost created to adapt to the American
palate, today the California roll is considered to be “the key innovationthat made sushi accessible to Americans.”50 Since then many different
American sushi rolls have been invented and have entered the international foodscape.
Students of the California Sushi Academy are trained to create rolls
particularly for American consumers and learn, for instance, that mostAmericans are reluctant to eat black food such as nori (seaweed)and that
therefore inside-out rolls are preferred, with the rice coating the roll andhiding the black seaweed inside the roll.51 American sushi rolls are larger
than Japanese rolls and use fatty ingredients absent in the Japanese versions. By having pork, mayonnaise, or even ice cream as ingredients theyno longer are a “healthy alternative,” and “a sushi takeout box from an
American supermarket could easily contain as many calories as two
slices of pizza, and the rolls served in restaurants are often worse.”52
Again, sushi, formerly appreciated for having low fat, is transformed,
and the dish no longer can be consumed as a health food. American sushi
has become more a Western version of ﬁnger food and is served as amodern appetizer at parties. That it exists alongside Japanese sushi contradicts the notion that Japanese-American food exchanges lead to ahomogenization of the eating culture. On the contrary, due to these cultural exchanges, new transnational versions of sushi have been created,which enrich the culinary landscape of both nations.
VI.

AMERICAN SUSHI IN JAPAN

Today, some American sushi versions have crossed the Paciﬁc and areavailable in Japan as well. In Japan the altered American sushi versions
are also not seriously considered to be sushi but more as a new American
dish, sushi as imagined by Americans. Japanese food writers such as
Katô Hiroko, Matsumoto Hirotaka, and Ikezawa Yasushi acknowledge
the popularity of sushi in the United States and do not criticize the modiﬁcation of sushi in the West. Instead, they understand that sushi can have

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different meanings in different cultures and reinforce the idea that themeaning of a cuisine is never ﬁxed.
In Sushi Purizu! Katô Hiroko explains to her Japanese readers the difference between the Japanese idea of sushi and the American idea ofsushi. She does not criticize the American way of making sushi with avocado and mayonnaise to be consumed with Coke, since she acknowledges that Japanese diners prefer their pizza with squid and oolong tea,
thereby consuming pizza in a Japanese way.53 Katô observes that much
more sushi is consumed in the United States than in Japan,54 and she
speculates that Americans are not only fond of the taste of sushi but thatthe originality of the dish and the entertainment provided in Americansushi restaurants contributes to a positive image of sushi in America.55
Indeed, in the United States, restaurants combine “Japanese food withan American taste of entertainment,”56 in an atmosphere that includes
American popular music, karaoke, and sometimes even a karate show.
In Japan, however, sushi is traditionally consumed in silence to appreciate the taste, and traditionally “the sushi experience was a matter ofgetting to know the chef at your neighborhood sushi bar, visiting frequently, and letting him choose what he thought you would like.”57 Thus,
not only the ingredients of sushi are changed in the United States, but
the context in which sushi is consumed is altered as well. In Japan the
preparation of sushi is traditionally considered to be a male realm, andmost traditional sushi bars cater to men. However, the more recent trendof serving American sushi in Japanese sushi bars with jazz music playing in the background increasingly attracts young Japanese women.58
American sushi restaurants such as Rainbow Roll Sushi in Tokyo areless traditional and offer a more modern ambience. The restaurant advertises itself on its ofﬁcial website as a place for “casual dining,”59 and themenu is full of sushi and rolls that would “scandalize traditionalists.”60
Nevertheless, not all American sushi rolls are reproduced and served in
the restaurant, but only those that meet Japanese consumer tastes.61
Furthermore, the Japanese owners of the restaurant acknowledge thatsushi, like other cultural commodities, changes when it travels acrossnational and cultural borders, and they alter the American sushi versions
in their restaurant to make them more appealing and palatable forJapanese consumers, thus relocalizing American sushi in Japan.
The history of sushi shows that the dish has always been in ﬂux,
changing over time and “remaking itself over centuries due to shiftingpressures of economics and culture.”62 Sushi was “invented” in the

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eighteenth century and at that time it was mainly sold in Edo as a street
snack. Today, it is served in different variations in many different countries. In the past, sushi was traditionally served as part of an upscale formal dinner in Japan. However, today with the use of the conveyer belt
in sushi restaurants to deliver sushi to guests, and the invention of a sushi
robot that processes sushi, eating sushi for a light lunch snack is madeaffordable and popular again. This informal form of consuming sushi
paved the way for American sushi to enter Japan. Nowadays, Americansushi is an established genre in Tokyo restaurant culture.63 As sushi is inconstant ﬂux, and different versions of the dish are invented in the UnitedStates and Japan by chefs from both sides of the Paciﬁc in order to meet
consumer demand, this contradicts the concepts of hegemonic globalization and cultural imperialism. The assumption that cultural (food)transfer is one-sided and forced upon a weaker nation cannot be applied
to the food exchange between Japan and the United States.
CONCLUSION
After overcoming initial prejudices about the food of each other’sculture, Japan and the United States started to engage in a culinary
exchange. Although the diet of the United States is traditionally centeredon meat and wheat, sushi has helped to popularize ﬁsh and rice. On theirside of the Paciﬁc, Japanese started to consume meat and dairy products
after regular contact with the United States, and today even sushi rolls
containing beef are eaten. Today sushi travels from Japan to the UnitedStates, is modiﬁed and made into American sushi, and from there travels back to Japan, where it is modiﬁed again, contributing to a transnational globalizing process. Therefore, each culinary culture inﬂuences
the other nation’s eating habits and challenges its own ideas about“other” food by openly engaging in a culinary exchange.
The mixing of different ingredients or cooking styles is not a new phenomenon. Nevertheless, food is “linked to overall social hierarchies andpower relations,”64 and the question of whether using and mixing different ingredients and different culinary styles in American sushi might
not be a sign of culinary colonialism and disrespect for a different culinary culture remains. It can be argued that using Japanese techniques tocreate an American version of sushi for a U.S. market is a violation ofJapanese culinary habits, because these new versions could be consumed
as just another exotic dish. Yet, eating habits are culturally learned, andIMAGINING THE TASTE

247

dishes are constructed, that is to say imagined, by those who prepare
them. Therefore, every dish is not only frequently changed when transferred to another culture but also when prepared by another chef. We canrelate this to Appadurai’s idea about utilizing the imagination as a positive force to imagine alternative versions of sushi without creating binaries of self and Other. American sushi can be interpreted as sushi
imagined by Western and Japanese sushi chefs, and thus it cannot becalled an Orientalist dish, created to meet only the Western palate. The
dish is open to new interpretations from both cultures, and, therefore, it
is both a Japanese dish with an American twist and vice versa.
The example of American sushi shows how intercultural, transnational, and cross-cultural exchanges of food lead to a larger variety offood and eating styles in both cultures and do not necessarily lead to ahomogenization of tastes. By crossing and recrossing Japanese andAmerican culinary borders, mixing cooking styles from both cultures,and giving them new names, a new hybrid eating culture has been established that no longer primarily belongs to one culture, thereby leading
to a heterogenization of sushi.
Former ideas of cultural imperialism and Orientalism cannot beapplied to this cross-cultural exchange between Japan and the UnitedStates, which is not unidirectional and which has created a new transnational cultural form. The analysis of the creation of new American sushi
dishes shows that local negotiations take place when cultural commodities are transferred from one culture to another. Additionally, it becomes
obvious that these commodities have a different meaning in the hostcountry than in their country of origin. As some food has the power toseparate people from different cultures, new codes in eating and preparing this food can bridge cultural differences in eating patterns. Food can“change perspectives and take us places we never thought possible.”65
Thus, “the acknowledgement of differences has led to the birth of new
cultural forms that are neither American nor Japanese but a fusion of thetwo.”66 These differences however are no longer judged according to
Orientalist perceptions. The ideas of the “raw” and the “cooked” nolonger indicate an “otherness” of the other culture, and therefore fusion
dishes such as American sushi bridge a culinary gap that existed for hundreds of years. Yet this fusion of two different food cultures in Americansushi is not based on homogenizing processes but on national andculinary differences, which are needed to make the dish appealing forAmerican and Japanese consumers. The American ingredients give

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Western consumers the reassurance of something familiar, while
Japanese techniques and ingredients such as nori or vinegared riceprovide a point of identiﬁcation for Japanese consumers. Therefore,
American sushi does not generally extinguish Japanese sushi, which isstill available in the United States as well, but is only an alternative,
transnational possibility for enjoying different types of sushi both inJapan and the United States.
NOTES
1John Tomlinson, Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction (London: Pinter,
1994), 20.
2
Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1994), 9.
3
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 6.
4
Warren J. Belasco, “Food Matters: Perspectives on an Emerging Field,” in Food
Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Society, ed. Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton(London: Routledge, 2002), 2.
5
Katarzyna Cwiertka, introduction to Asian Food: The Global and the Local, ed.
Katarzyna Cwiertka and Boudewijn Walraven (Richmond, VA: Routledge Curzon,
2002), 2.
6
Belasco, “Food Matters,” 14.
7
Cwiertka, Asian Food, 9.
8Ibid., 3.
9Leslie Brenner, American Appetite: The Coming of Age of a Cuisine (New York:Avon, 1999), 166.
10
Michael Wise, ed., Travelers’ Tales of Old Japan (Singapore: Times Books International, 1985), 16.
11
Walter LaFeber, The Clash: A History of U.S.-Japan Relations (New York: W. W.
Norton, 1997), 23.
12
Quoted in W. G. Beasly, Japan Encounters the Barbarian: Japanese Travellers in
America and Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 23.
13
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney, “McDonald’s in Japan: Changing Manners and Etiquette,”
in Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia, ed. James L. Watson (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1997), 167.
14
Susan Fuller Slack, Japanese Cooking for the American Table (New York: HP
Books, 1996), 152.
15
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology, trans. John and Doreen Weighman (New York: Harper and Row, 1996).
16
Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney quoted in Sasha Issenberg, The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy (New York: Gotham Books, 2007), 94.
17
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), 43.
18
Ibid., 3.
19Bell Hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press,
1992), 21.
20James Beard, Beard on Food (New York: Knopf, 1978), 161.
21
McDonald’s, “Asian Chicken Salad,” http://www.mcdonalds.com/usa/eat/features/salads.html (accessed September 23, 2007).

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22

249

Ibid.
Henry Yu, Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact and Exoticism in Modern
America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 85.
24
Lisa Heldke, Exotic Appetites: Ruminations of a Food Adventurer (New York:
Routledge, 2003), xv.
25
Ibid., xv.
26
Ibid., 7.
27
Lucy Long, “Culinary Tourism: A Folkloristic Perspective on Eating and Otherness,” in Culinary Tourism, ed. Lucy Long (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,2004).
28
Ibid., 20.
29
Ibid., 21.
30
Heldke, Exotic Appetites, 43.
31Michael Ashkenazi and Jeanne Jacob, The Essence of Japanese Cuisine (Richmond,
VA: Routledge Curzon, 2000), 5.
32
Ibid., 47.
33
See Naomi Moriyama and William Doyle, Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat(New York: Delta, 2007), 4.
34
Issenberg, Sushi Economy, 97.
35
Theodore Bestor, “How Sushi Went Global,” in The Cultural Politics of Food andEating: A Reader, ed. James Watson and Melissa L. Caldwell (Malden, MA: Blackwell,2005), 56–57.
36
Marijke van der Veen, ”When Is Food a Luxury?” World Archeology 34, no. 3(2003), 405–27; quote at 406.
37
See also, Issenberg, Sushi Economy, xvii.
38
Ken Kawasumi, The Encyclopedia of Sushi Rolls, trans. Laura Diussi (Tokyo:
Graph-Sha, 2006).
39
Judi Strada and Minko Takane Moreno, Sushi for Dummies (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley,2004), 11.
40
Ibid., 15.
41
Ibid., 13.
42
Ibid., 163.
43
Tracy Grifﬁth, Sushi American Style (New York: Clarkson Potter, 2004), 77.
44
California Sushi Academy, “About CSA,” http://www.sushi-academy.com/pages/
aboutcsa.html (accessed March 22, 2006).
45
Trevor Corson, The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi from Samurai to Supermarket(New York: Harper Collins, 2007), 4.
46
Ibid., 4.
47
Ibid., 4.
48
Ibid., 81.
49
Ibid., 82.
50
Ibid., 81.
51
Ibid., 82.
52
Ibid., 27.
53
Hiroko Katô, sushi purizu! Amerikajin sushi o kûu. (Sushi Please! Americans
Devouring Sushi). (Tokyo: Sûeisha Shinsho, 2002), 73.
54
Ibid., 7.
55
Ibid., 68.
56
Issenberg, Sushi Economy, 89.
57
Corson, Zen of Fish, 101.
23

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IRIS-AYA LAEMMERHIRT

Ibid., 54.
WDI Group, “Rainbow Roll Sushi,” http://www.wdi.co.jp/ja/re-rainbow.html(accessed 12.01.2008).
60
Issenberg, Sushi Economy, xxiii.
61
Kato, Sushi Purizu! 220.
62
Issenberg, Sushi Economy, xxi.
63
Ibid., xxiii.
64
Carol Counihan and Penny Esterik, Introduction to Food and Culture: A Reader,ed. Carole Counihan and Penny Esterik (New York: Routledge, 1997), 3.
65
Patricia Harris, David Lyon, and Sue McLaughlin, The Meaning of Food: The
Companion to the PBS Television Series Hosted By Marcus Samuelsson (Guilford, CN:
Globe Pequot Press, 2005), vi.
66
Hirotaka Matsumoto, Osushi chikyû o mawaru [Sushi around the world] (Tokyo:
Kôbunsha, 2002), 142.
59