While there are many delicious and famous Japanese dishes, the most renowned dish is sushi and sashimi. Sushi is made of vinegared rice with fish or seafood placed on top of the rice. Unlike sushi, sashimi does not include rice in its dish- it is just a slice of raw fish. When people think of sashimi, they tend to picture thinly, beautifully cut raw fish. However, they can be sliced into various shapes such as a rectangle, a strip, and even a cube. Both sushi and sashimi are very popular not only because of their taste but their nutrition. However, why did the Japanese start eating raw fish rather than cooking them? 

Sashimi is well-known in Japan. Eating raw fish, meaning ‘sashimi’, started in the Edo period when sushi was first introduced to Japan. Another famous dish in Japan is Sushi. Did you know that sushi originated from China? Before sushi was known in Japan, China used rice to preserve fish fresh and prevent the growth of bacteria. However, when they ate those fish, they removed rice and only consumed the fermented fish, being only 50% sushi. Then, by the 8th century, the dish spread from China to Japan. In the 18th century, there was a boom in sushi. One writer said that there were one or two sushi restaurants in every 100 x 100-meter square block. Also, in the same century, Hanaya Yohei discovered that by adding vinegar to rice, making it smaller, and adding a slice of fish made the dish much more delicious and portable. The new type of sushi he made was called ‘nigiri’.

There are many types of dishes with raw fish. First, sushi can be divided into four different types: nigiri, maki, uramaki, and temaki. The word ‘nigiri’ means to grip and it is oval-shaped. Raw fish or seafood is usually placed on top but is sometimes cooked. Maki is a cylindrical shape with layers of ingredients in the middle, then rice surrounding the ingredients, and a sheet of dry seaweed called nori wraps the whole thing. Next is uramaki which is very similar to maki. It has rice outside and nori inside. Lastly, temaki is another type of sushi that has a cone shape. It has rice, fish, and other sushi fillings inside a cone-shaped nori. Different from sushi, there are no multiple forms of sashimi, but they can be divided by types and part of the fish used. The sashimi examples are maguro, sake, and amaebi.

So, why did Japanese people start to eat raw fish? Of course, people usually cooked fish in the past because it was difficult to keep raw fish fresh for a long time. However, some Japanese religions believed that fresher fish meant purer food, so they started to eat raw fish. Also, when Buddhism entered Japan, the Buddhists taught them not to eat red meat. Therefore, people started to follow the religion, abandoning the original tradition, and considered any jobs related to blood as impurities. These beliefs made people eat more seafood rather than meat. The fresher raw fish, the purer and the cleaner food they would prefer to eat. In other words, they abandoned cooked fish for pure sashimi. 

In conclusion, both sushi and sashimi originated from China but were developed over time mostly in Japan. That led to one of the most famous dishes in Japan. Although these dishes were usually cooked and eaten as a daily meal in the past because of the lack of development in ways to preserve the food for a long period, these dishes eventually were changed over time by having mostly raw seafood with the impact of the religious beliefs. 

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