Fish Story

Sushi, as an icon of Japanese food culture, has gone into the daily lives of many people all around the world, and thus becomes a symbol of globalization. Sushi also has a long history in Singapore. First was served only to the Japanese customers along with other Japanese foods. Almost all the sushi restaurants were run by Japanese. And there were only a small number of Japanese restaurants in Singapore, about 10 and 20 in 1970s and between 40 and 50 in the mid-1980s. However, there are more than a hundred Japanese restaurants in Singapore and about one-third of the Japanese restaurants in Singapore are sushi restaurants. And Singaporeans have become the main consumers of sushi in Singapore. And in fact, the number of Japanese restaurants in Singapore can match that of McDonald’s!Sushi, as a much healthier cuisine with rice, fish and vegetables, and the wonderful and appetizing design, now is favored all around the world and signaling a rejection of American junk food. And from the case of sushi, it shows that globalization does not necessarily homogenize cultural differences nor erase the salience of cultural labels. In fact, because of the brand equity of sushi as Japanese cultural property, with the Japanese fashion wind sweeping around Asia, even the world, many people start to taste sushi as a fashion and love it and add the likes toward Japan.And sushi is different from most of the foreign cuisines in a way that sushi and Japanese food in general found their way into mainstream society trough international travel and business in the 1960s and 1970s, however, other foreign cuisines usually started out in immigrate communities.The raw materials of sushi, fish, have shown the traits of globalization as well. For example, in the Japanese fish market, Tsukiji, the world largest seafood market, octopus from Senegal, salmon from Norway, eel from Guangzhou, and urchin from Maine are sold all around the world in the blink of an eye. And bluefin tuna, Japanese most favored seafood, can be traded many times across currencies and oceans, and will travel thousands of miles, only to be eaten eventually. Globalization in fact has also changed sushi. This diffusion of culinary culture can be shown in the tastes for sushi. Rainbow roll sushi, opened by Ms Shibata who once lived in America, brings the Japanese a globalized sushi – American-style sushi with cream cheese and chili as some of the ingredients, adds beauty to this traditional food culture of Japan.

references: http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/12.06/03-bestor.html
www.motherjones.com/news/mustreads/2000/12/122300.html