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the sugar plantations of Hawai’i, and were soon followed by thousands
of countrymen heading for various destinations in East Asia, North and
South America, and Australia. 2 After the turn of the twentieth century,
with the rise of the Japanese colonial empire, Japanese communities in
Korea, Taiwan, China and Manchuria grew rapidly and hosted the largest
concentration of the Japanese overseas population. In 1930 more than a
million Japanese resided in Asia, of which half were in Korea. Beyond
Asia, however, the United States (including the island of Hawai’i) ranked
first in terms of a Japanese resident population. Between 1910 and 1940 the
number of Japanese residents in Hawai’i doubled, growing from 70,000
to more than 150,000. The Japanese population in the continental United
States reached nearly 130,000, the overwhelming majority being clustered
in California. 3
Grocers and restaurants that provide native food are among the
first establishments to emerge within every immigrant community, and
Japanese were no exception to this rule. By the end of the nineteenth
century, the Japanese quarter named ‘Little Tokyo’ developed in the
Chinatown of Los Angeles, with several restaurants that served native
fare. Their number remained stable over the years, except for the 1940s,
when, prompted by the outbreak of the Pacific War, the us government
ordered Japanese Americans to be evacuated from their place of residence
and incarcerated in so-called War Relocation Authority (wra) camps. 4 By
the 1950s, Little Tokyo recovered as the centre of the Japanese-American
community in California, still the periphery of American gastronomy. The
situation began to change a decade later, when the number of Japanese
restaurants in the Los Angeles area rocketed – from 15 in 1965 to 43 in 1970,
88 in 1975, and 173 in 1980. 5
The sushi boom was born in the hub of the Californian counterculture,
the neo-bohemian youth movement of the Johnson–Nixon years
that embraced organic foods and ethnic cuisines. 6 Japan’s emergence as a
global economic power during the 1970s, however, divorced Japanese
cuisine from its association with the counter-culture and differentiated it
from other types of ethnic food. The birth of sushi as a sign of class and
educational standing was signified by the opening of a sushi bar in the elite
sanctum of New York’s Harvard Club in 1972. 7
Within the following two decades, sushi swept the United States in
two waves. First, during the 1970s and ’80s, it became popular among
sophisticated consumers as a sign of class and cosmopolitanism. Gradually,
it gained an image of ‘yuppie food’; easy familiarity with sushi held considerable
cachet. The second wave of sushi came during the 1990s, when
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