Although Japan’s cuisine is complex and diverse, for most Americans, Japanese food is synonymous with sushi. There are thousands of sushi restaurants across the United States today, grossing billions annually. But 50 years ago, most Americans had never heard of sushi; if they ate Japanese food at all, it was more likely to be sukiyaki (beef and vegetables cooked hot-pot type in a soy-based broth) or tempura. If fact, many Americans would have thought the idea of consuming raw fish appalling. It took a smash-hit TV show and a boom in immigration from Japan to turn sushi into an everyday “American” food.

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How Sushi Came to America
In the 1950s many Americans were somewhat resistant to Japanese food and culture, in part because they had lived through World War II and still perceived Japan as “the enemy.” But by the 1960s, the tide had started to turn: Food journalist and restaurant critic Craig Claiborne, writing for The New York Times dining section during that decade, was excited by world dining and kept tabs on the city’s numerous Japanese restaurants. He declared Japanese food a trend in New York after two establishments opened in 1963, noting that “New Yorkers seem to take to the raw fish dishes, sashimi and sushi, with almost the same enthusiasm they display for tempura and sukiyaki.” However, he admitted, “sushi may seem a trifle too ‘far out’ for many American palates”

According to The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice by Trevor Corson, Los Angeles was the first American home of authentic Japanese sushi. In 1966, a Japanese businessman named Noritoshi Kanai brought a sushi chef and his wife from Japan, and opened a nigiri sushi bar with them inside a Japanese restaurant known as Kawafuku in LA’s Little Tokyo. The restaurant was popular, but only with Japanese immigrants, not with American clientele. However, as more sushi spots opened in Little Tokyo, word got back to Japan that there was money to be made in America. Young chefs, tired of the rigorous and restrictive traditional culture of sushi making in Japan, struck out on their own in LA.