Origins Sushi
Root for Sushi
It is said that even though the style of early sushi was completely different from current Japanese sushi, the roots of Japanese sushi come from Southeast Asia. Sushi practices came through China and Korea to Japan about 1700 years ago, and the current style of Nigiri Sushi was born at “Edo” (Tokyo, Japan) in the early 1800s.
The oldest Japanese sushi is called "Nare-Zushi (Nare-Sushi)". This sushi was usually made using fresh water fish. The fish was mixed with cooked rice and put in a tub with a weight placed on top of the tub. For several months to several years, the fish was fermented with the rice. When it was time to eat the fish, the rice was removed, and the fish only was eaten. This is an old style of "Nare-Zushi". However, even in current days in some areas in Southeast Asia, people are still making food in this way.
In Japan we also inherit similar style sushi here and there. The famous sushi of this type is “Funa-Zushi” of Shiga Prefecture or “Hatahata-Zushi” of Akita Prefecture Japan (we have several other area where they make “Nare-Zushi” in Japan). Some of them are treated as high-class foods and it is very expensive even though it is somewhat difficult to eat because of its smell.
In the era of 1400~1500 in Japan, people started to eat not only the fish, but also the rice and shortening the fermentation period to less than a month or a few months. This type of sushi is known as "Nama Nare Sushi".
Then, in the era of Edo, vinegar was introduced in Japan and the fermentation process was eliminated by using vinegar and enabled people to eat sushi just after it was cooked. This style became the main style of current Japanese sushi, even though we still have "Nare-Zushi" and "Nama Nare Sushi". Making sushi with rice vinegar was the start of current sushi making practices.
Origins of the word "Sushi"
The linguistic root for the word “sushi” is unclear. However, there are a few explanations.
The most popular one is that the word is an adjective which was used in the Kyoto area in Japan. The meaning of "sushi" is sour taste. This word itself became the name of sushi because the taste of fermented fish was "sushi" or sour. So the people of the Kyoto area called this type of food "sushi" (Kyoto was a center of Japanese culture and had a large influence over the whole area of Japan).
Another probable root word for "sushi" is the word "sumeshi" which means "the vinegared rice". The first part of the word "su" means vinegar, and the rest of the word "meshi" means rice. This word became "sushi", with the center part "me" of the word being left out.
