Konichiwa Hiro San
@HiroyukiTakisawa
Long time no see. I am doing fine especially in the middle of winter when the temperature climbed up to 7+C today, 2 days before Christmas. Hope you are doing well too with your little bundle of joy.
You raise a number of great questions.
In Canada we said to have more sushi restaurants than in Japan ( just a joke).
We have had 3 sushi bars in Vancouver 1976. As of 2014 they say that there were 600.
California roll (avocado, Surimi and cucumber) and B.C. roll (BBQ salmon) were both invented in Vancouver. The largest Sushi expansion was due to business acumen of a Russian banker who worked in Japan for the Canadian CIBC bank. After him we now have a sushi bar in any supermarket now.
But please do not ask me how authentic they are. Majority of Sushi, considering that the original Sushi is the art of Edo Era in serving raw fish with vinegared or fermented rice, anything rolled out in rice can be called sushi. As a result we have sushi burgers and sushi burrito now.
Now we have thousands; one or two sushi and sashimi bars in every small town.
Apart from sushi, Chef Koji Kobayashi who hails from Osaka and is a great kaiseki artist runs a restaurant by the name Shokunin. Chef Masayoshi Baba’s small but great restaurant is Masayoshi. Junichi Ikematsu is from Kyoto but trained in France is behind the success of Jun 1. His Tuna Tataki is the best in town.
This is the answer to the other question.
There are very sad stories, some of which have become award winning books and movies, of the original Japanese migrants who arrived at the turn of the century. In 1942, internment of Japanese Canadians occurred when over 22,000 Japanese Canadians, comprising over 90 percent of the total Japanese Canadian population, from British Columbia were evacuated and interned in the name of “national security”.
This a video by David Suzuki
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8TQTuMqM9g
Irrespective, in in1960s more Japanese have arrived after immigration reforms initiated by then prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the father of the current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. We currently have about 130,000 Canadians of Japanese origin.
In their own respective fields Joy Kogawa, David Suzuki, Tom Shoyama, Raymond Moriyama, Jon Kimura-Parker, Takao Tanabe, Richard Ikeda, Irene Uchida, Marika Omatsu, and Linda Ohama are some of who contributed Canada what it is to be, today. I personally respect David Suzuki so much due to his efforts to save the environment.
This is a handai from Sasakawa family, a pioneering Japanese family in Vancouver, to me that I treasure so much.
Answer to the last question.
I personally believe, that majority of what we eat here as sushi are really Kim Bup, the Korean version of Sushi. These are the reason why. Many people do not know here how to make perfect sushi rice. ( su=Vinegar Shi=rice). Kim Bup is plain rice and only cooked spiced food. Dyed horseradish in green food colouring here is called Nabida or Wasabi. They hold one chopstick (one of your worst table etiquette)to mix soy sauce with wasabi to make a dipping sauce for sushi.
I hope I gave you sufficient laughing stock for days.
Arigato Domo and Sayonara for now. Till we meet again.
