Where Did Sushi Originate? Two Places, 1,500 Years Apart

Hanaya Yohei took his sushi off the street in 1824, trading his yatai, a small outdoor stall in Edo, now Tokyo, for a full-fledged shop in Ryogoku. Across the city the new nigiri stayed stall food, often eaten standing, and each ball of rice was about three times the size of a modern one.

By then the word sushi had been in Japanese writing for more than a thousand years, and for most of that time it named fish packed in rice and left for months until it turned sour.

Where did sushi originate?

Sushi began on the Asian mainland as a way to preserve fish by packing it with salt and cooked rice to ferment. It likely emerged in southern China or Southeast Asia, is first recorded in Chinese texts, and was in Japan by the eighth century. Nigiri, the familiar form, appeared in Edo, now Tokyo, in the early nineteenth century.

The claim that sushi was invented in China, not Japan, is half right: the technique is first written down in China, and the dish on the menu was invented in Japan more than 1,500 years later.

The first sushi was fish left to sour in rice

The historian Eric Rath of the University of Kansas, author of Oishii: The History of Sushi, puts the first references in China: a dish of salt and fish in the third century BCE, then one that “mixes fish and salt and rice” in the third century CE. Rath cites a sixth-century Chinese recipe for the method: the fish is salted and packed in rice, which helps a lactic acid fermentation along until the fish becomes a pickled food. The taste, he says, is “sour, like yogurt.”

Naomichi Ishige, who surveyed Asia’s fermented fish products with Kenneth Ruddle in a 1980s series from Japan’s National Museum of Ethnology, defines narezushi as fish, mammal or bird flesh fermented with salt and a cooked carbohydrate, usually rice. The fermentation lowers the pH, and acid, which also helps keep honey from spoiling, holds back the microorganisms that cause putrefaction.

In the oldest style, the sushi historian Terutoshi Hibino writes in Kikkoman’s Food Forum, the fish fermented for “several months to half a year”.

“Only the fish was eaten,” Hibino writes of that oldest sushi, “while the rice, broken down to liquid form, was discarded.” The rice that now defines sushi began as the part people threw away.

The rice-paddy origin is a hypothesis its author hedges

A first written record is not a birthplace, and Ishige’s 1989 paper on origins proposes one: ricefield fishing developed in continental Southeast Asia, he writes, and “the preparation of narezushi seems to have developed parallel with the rise of irrigated rice cultivation in the Mekong Basin.”

The survey also counts Korean fermented fish dishes among Asia’s narezushi, and the 1989 paper concedes there is no evidence for how these foods travelled between Southeast and Northeast Asia, allowing that they may have arisen separately.

The osprey nest is a legend

Writers of Japan’s early modern period, 1600 to 1868, told a different origin story, Rath says: “osprey sushi”, which many of them called the origin of sushi. Ospreys were supposed to gather fish in their nests and urinate on them, and the fish, salt water and urine were said to ferment together. “I think this is more of a made-up story,” he says, “but it’s a fascinating one.”

Funazushi is the ancestor still being made

The old kind survives in Shiga Prefecture. The Japan Tourism Agency calls funazushi “a type of narezushi, fermented fish, which is the oldest form of sushi,” served in the region since the Heian period (794-1185). It is made from nigorobuna, a round crucian carp that lives only in Lake Biwa and its connected waterways. The fish are filled with salt and aged for a few months, then stacked in cooked rice, where lactic acid bacteria dissolve the bones and ferment the fish.

Rath, who ate it at every meal for three days, says it tastes “like a summer sausage or like a prosciutto.” Many eaters today skip the rice, he says, since after months it turns into “a glue-ish paste”.

Vinegar turned a pickle into fast food

Rice was too valuable to waste, Rath points out, and in Japan it was also used as a currency, so people began eating the fish sooner and the rice with it. Cooks later sped things up with vinegar until “you can make your sushi right away.” Hibino’s history gives the stages:

Stage	Date (per Hibino)	Fermentation
Narezushi	Oldest form	Several months to half a year; only the fish eaten
Nama-nare	Around the 15th century	One or two months; rice eaten too
Vinegar-soured sushi	18th century	Shortened, with vinegar as the main souring agent
Hayazushi, “fast-made sushi”	By the early 19th century	None
Nigiri prototype	1820s, in Edo	None

Caper makers face the same choice today: the traditional cure ferments the buds in sea salt, while other capers are pickled in vinegar instead.

The first nigiri used cured or cooked fish

“Originally, the rice was not topped with raw fish ingredients,” Hibino writes of the 1820s nigiri. The fish “was marinated in salt, vinegar or soy sauce or it was boiled or grilled to prevent spoiling.”

Tuna came later. Edo sushi shops took it up in the 1830s, after a glut, and marinated the slices in soy sauce, the Heibonsha World Encyclopedia says. Rath describes vendors setting out ice, fish and rice to sell hand-formed nigiri in the mornings, because the food had “a very short shelf life.”

Raw fish became widespread after World War II, with what Hibino calls “the remarkable development in refrigeration technology.” Tuna was already a topping, but bluefin caught on only after the war, Rath says, once fast freezing developed. Before then a lot of it “sold really cheaply, even as like cat food or dog food.”

Sushi comes from ‘sour’, not ‘raw fish’

Japanese dictionaries, including the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, trace the word to an old adjective, also pronounced sushi, meaning sour. The dictionary defines the food first as fish or shellfish salted and left to ferment, and its earliest example is a tax register from 734. Using sushi to mean raw fish, a common English habit, gets the word wrong. The name records a taste, the way the french in french fries records a way of frying.

Hanaya Yohei’s credit rests on a theory

Nippon.com states flatly that “the nigiri form of sushi was invented by sushi chef Hanaya Yohei.” The Nihon Kokugo Daijiten is more guarded: its entry for nigiri says only that there is a theory he was its founder.

Japan’s farm ministry lists the “Edo Sanzushi”, the three sushi of Edo, which “are said to have contributed greatly to the spread of nigiri-zushi”: Matsuzaki Kiemon’s kenuki sushi, Hanaya Yohei’s Yohei sushi and Sakaiya Matsugoro’s matsuga-zushi. The kenuki shop opened in 1702, more than a century before nigiri, and still wraps its sushi in bamboo leaves. Hibino dates the prototype to the 1820s and names nobody. Yohei’s is the name that stuck.

Whoever shaped the first nigiri, the oldest part of the dish survives in its name. Sushi is still named for a sour taste, and its rice is still soured, now by vinegar in minutes instead of by months of fermentation. Strictly FYI.