A hilarious video via blog Chez Pim inducts viewers into the mysterious world of eating at a sushi bar. The tongue-in-cheek guide, which appears to have been directed by the Japanese love child of Davids Lynch and Byrne, takes the clueless through each step, from entering the sushi bar (“open the noren, or curtain, by pushing through on the spot 3.2 inches up at an angle of 48 degrees on the third panel”) to the ritual of eating from the saucer of salt outside at the end.
An astute Pim reader traces “How to Eat at a Sushi Bar” to a Japanese comedy duo, Ra-menzu, who also star in the Japanese Mac versus PC ads. A little more research reveals that the comedians are Jin Katagiri and Kentaro Kobayashi, and that the spoof pokes fun at the average Japanese discomfort with sushi etiquette.
That last bit of research belongs to Trevor Corson, the author of The Zen of Fish: The Story of Sushi, from Samurai to Supermarket, and he has his own, more serious video about how to eat sushi.
Step one: Break the chopsticks over your knee …
That video clip is old, and has been circulating around the net for a year or more now. I’m surprised Pim took so long to “discover” it and be quoted as if she unearthed it.
By the way it’s not Taicho, it’s Taisho….
it comes from an old series of “japanese tradition” films but this is the best one in the series.. definitely very old and not new.
Very amusing, thanks for sharing. It might be ancient history to some, but I hadn’t seen it before.