Documentaries Delve Into the Sushi Economy

A Sushi-A-Go-Go fast-food trailer in Austin, Tex.“Sushi: The Global Catch” A Sushi-A-Go-Go fast-food trailer in Austin, Tex., from “Sushi:The Global Catch.”
Green: Business

In the greater Paris region, where I live and work, there are more than 1,600 sushi restaurants. They are springing up faster than can be counted in Eastern Europe, India and China, not to mention Los Angeles and New York.

Yet the authenticity of many of them is dubious. Some were transformed from cheap Chinese restaurants to cheap Japanese restaurants with the aid of kits and machines provided by helpful industry vendors; others belong to the growing number of fast-food-style sushi franchises. All are in the business of selling fish and vinegared rice.

Mark S. Hall, director of “Sushi: The Global Catch,” winner of a special jury prize this month at the Seattle International Film Festival, first sampled sushi as a student in Tokyo in the 1980s, but he did not get to thinking about the sushi economy until a few years ago.

“I was working in Warsaw as part of a cooperative that was building a pretty interesting organic agriculture business,” Mr. Hall said in a telephone interview from Austin, Tex., where he lives today. “We were at a meeting, and when we broke for lunch I assumed we’d go for bigos [a kind of cabbage stew] or sausages. Instead we went for sushi. I got to wondering how, in a culture where they hadn’t known it even a few years before, it had gotten so popular. And it wasn’t the same, it really wasn’t anything like the experience I’d had in Tokyo. It just floored me.”

Mr. Hall’s documentary starts by tracing sushi’s traditions, focusing on Mamoru Sugiyama, chef at Sushiko in Tokyo, a Michelin-starred restaurant that dates back to the 19th century. We learn that in Japan, budding sushi chefs must go through a long apprenticeship to become masters, enduring the drudgery of washing dishes, preparing rice and cutting vegetables before they even begin to start cutting fish. Only in the fifth year do they begin slicing fish in earnest.

In their seventh year, the apprentices graduate to serving and conversing with customers. That’s the same length of time it takes to both earn a bachelor’s degree and graduate from medical school. With qualifications like these, sushi might have stayed in Japan.

The turning point, according to a French television documentary released last year — “World Sushi: Dead Oceans Ahead” — was the rise of California sushi, and in particular the phenomenal career of the celebrity chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa. Mr. Matsuhisa was born in Saitama Prefecture in Japan and opened his breakthrough Beverly Hills restaurant in 1987, and sushi quickly acquired a certain chic. He went on to build a Nobu empire that stretches from the West Coast to New York, Melbourne, London, Hong Kong, Mykonos and Milan.

America rose quickly to the challenge of democratizing sushi, managing to condense those seven years of training to three months or even less, as Trevor Corson notes in “The Story of Sushi.”

Both documentaries offer a penetrating introduction to the workings of the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, the world’s largest, as well as the growing “local” character of sushi in the West. In my particular favorite example from Mr. Hall’s documentary, a Japanese sushi chef in Texas makes ‘‘Longhorn rolls’’ with rib-eye steak, cream cheese and avocado, served with a green sauce made of cilantro and jalapeño.

Of course, that’s only half the story, the other half being the overfishing that has proved so devastating to many species of fish. Both documentaries shift abruptly from the sushi tale to the conservation story, with the narrative alternating between those who are hoping that informed consumers can help to rescue the seas by eating only “sustainable” sushi, and those who believe in untrammeled fishing regardless of the costs.

“I thought it was very important that people understood the unintended consequences that globalization was having on endangered fish,” Mr. Hall said.

Sushi demand is hardly the only reason for the decline of fish populations, but it is a critical element in the case of some. The bluefin tuna, currently the subject of perhaps the highest-profile conservation campaign undertaken for any fish, is the primary example. While pretty much everyone agrees that the bluefin, the most valuable fish in the sea, is endangered, not everyone agrees that it requires official protection.

One of the most telling moments in the French documentary comes as the crew follows Mr. Matsuhisa to a fish market and asks him about the ethics of serving bluefin in his restaurants.

“Nobody knows about 50 years later,” he replies. “I buy the fish from the fish company, the fish company has a license to buy the tuna. Then why does Greenpeace attack us?” Then he suggests a change in subject.

Sushi’s rise to globalism has attracted a lot of attention in recent years, notably from the American journalist Sasha Issenberg, in his book “The Sushi Economy,” and from Theodore C. Bestor, a Harvard anthropologist and the author of “Global Sushi: Soft Power and Hard Realities.” The new documentaries are both useful additions to the literature.

Like “The End of the Line,” , a 2009 documentary by the investigative reporter Charles Clover, “World Sushi: Dead Oceans Ahead (whose original French subtitle read “Tomorrow, Our Children Will Eat Jellyfish”) is an excellent primer on the problems caused by overfishing. It looks at the workings of the international fish trade through a wide geographical lens, including fishermen and markets in Japan, the Mediterranean, Senegal, Peru and the United States.

First screened in Europe at 90 minutes on Canal Plus television in February 2010, the documentary shrank to just 56 minutes in its international English-language version.
‘‘That was a decision of the agency,” Jean-Pierre Canet, one of the directors, told me.”Maybe the Americans and the Norwegians don’t have the attention span for a longer one.’’

Interestingly, both Mr. Hall and Mr. Canet said that when they began their projects, they planned to focus on sushi and its rise to world food status, but then found that the environmental issues turned out to be the more important story.

‘Instead of the original project I’d imagined on the tradition and consumption of sushi with a little discussion of the environmental issues, I realized I had it backwards. So I refocused on the environmental issues, with overfishing being the most urgent topic,’’ Mr. Canet said.

‘‘I like sushi — I’m not the Taliban,” he said. “But we have to do it a lot more intelligently than we are currently. We have to change the mindset that sees wild fish as a commodity like wheat or corn. It’s impossible to imagine that the system we have now can continue.’’

Mr. Hall noted that the prospects for some fish, especially those at the top of the food chain, do not appear to be good. He said he hoped that consumer education would help.

“I’m probably more optimistic than I should be,” he said. “Maybe that means I’m naïve. But I think doing something is better than doing nothing.”

David Jolly is on Twitter at www.twitter.com/djolly_iht