Chapter 1: How did Norway's businessman introduce salmon sushi to Japan?
We did something that no one else had ever done.
There was such an excitement and energy about this moment.
It opened the door for everything that rapidly followed. Witness history. History as told by the people who were there. I was walking in space, the first man ever to do so. I felt almost insignificant, like a tiny ant compared to the immensity of the universe.
Witness history from the BBC World Service.
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Chapter 2: What historical context influenced the popularity of sushi in Japan?
Hello and welcome to the History Hour with me, Max Pearson, the amazing characters and stories that have appeared this week on Witness History on the BBC World Service. And coming up, the disability campaigners who changed the law in India.
People said, what can we do? And I said, well, look, even if it's a symbolic gesture, we have to come out on the streets. We have to, if nothing else, at least register our protest.
Also, we've got Laurel and Hardy at an English pub in the 1950s, plus how hundreds of Washington, D.C. 's most wanted were caught by the cops' offer of free NFL tickets. They're greedy. You know, a criminal looks for opportunity and what they can gain from opportunity. You know, we had family members show up instead of the criminals, so it's not always the criminal shows up.
Chapter 3: What challenges did Norwegian salmon face in the Japanese market?
I hate to say they're stupid enough to fall for it. And the story of the first-ever made-for-TV opera. Who's calling? Who's calling? The shepherds are calling! Who's calling? Well, this year I got into real trouble. I was supposed to finish an opera for NBC, and I just didn't have an idea in my head. That's all coming up.
But before that, we're going to take a look at a key moment in the history of Japanese sushi, a dish characterized by the addition of a protein, mainly raw fish, to sticky rice.
Chapter 4: How did the economic crash in Japan impact sushi consumption?
These days, sushi is found all over the world, and one of the main types of fish on offer is usually salmon. But it wasn't always so. In the late 1980s, Norway needed a new market for its growing farmed salmon production. Fish-loving Japan and its lucrative sushi market seemed to fit the bill. But salmon was one fish the Japanese did not traditionally eat raw.
Lars Bavanger has spoken to a man from the Arctic north of Norway, Bjorn Erik Olsson, who played a central role in getting salmon on sushi.
They are the samurai.
The 1954 film The Seventh Samurai opened Björn Eirik Olsson's eyes to Japan and its culture when he was very young. In my hometown, we didn't have television before 1967. I was 12 and the first movie I saw was The Seventh Samurai. And I was completely taken by that film and I decided at that moment that I want to be like them in a way.
Bjorn Eirik's interest in all things Japanese led him to move to Osaka, Japan's third city, to learn the language. Then he studied the production and use of seaweed at the Kyushu University in Fukuoka.
By 1986, this had made him the perfect candidate when the Norwegian government needed a market analyst for its Project Japan, an attempt to turn fish-loving Japan into a big new market for Norwegian fish. The main reason for starting this project in Japan, as it was called, was the capelin, shrimp, redfish and herring.
But by the late 1980s, Norway's salmon farming industry was growing rapidly and it became clear in Björn Eirik's mind that this fish had huge potential. I could see that the most interesting segment of the Japanese market was the sushi and sashimi market, dominated by very valuable seafood such as tuna, bluefin tuna, sea bream and various kinds of shellfish.
Fish used raw in sushi and sashimi would fetch up to ten times more than when sold for cooking. There was only one problem. The Japanese didn't eat salmon raw.
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Chapter 5: What significant changes occurred in Indian disability rights in 1995?
The main reason actually was that in the northern part of Japan, the wild fish can catch parasites. When we first introduced sushi salmon or sashimi salmon to people working in the industry, like wholesalers or supermarket people or importers, They said, oh, it smells like a river, the colour is wrong, it's not red enough.
So the whole task was to change the perception, the habits and the attitude of 120 million Japanese to eating salmon raw. To set their product apart from wild Pacific salmon that people in Japan would never eat raw, Björn Eirik and his team came up with a new name for the Norwegian salmon.
My clear conclusion was that we cannot call the Norwegian salmon sake, which is the Japanese name for salmon, because then it will be mixed with the culture of how to eat the Japanese salmon. We have to give it a new name and we just use the name salmon.
So Norway salmon was the Japaneseization of Norwegian salmon. And that name was, of course, totally foreign for them. Nobody knew what the salmon was.
Chapter 6: Who was Javed Abidi and what role did he play in disability rights?
So we had to build a completely new name.
Now, the Norwegians began running marketing campaigns in supermarkets for Norway salmon, and also linked up with some of the biggest names among Japanese chefs in the early 1990s, including Yukata Ishinabe, famous from the TV cookery programme Iron Chef, created and broadcast by Fuji Television Network. Mr. Ishinabe, the iron chef, was very popular in the Japanese TV.
We had contact with him, and he brought the salmon into his program and showed the difference of Atlantic salmon to the Pacific salmon. So you got some serious fish influencers. He was really an influencer long, long before the social media. This helped, but a real breakthrough remained elusive. Then things took another turn.
By the early 1990s, Norwegian farmed salmon production was growing much faster than what buyers in Europe and the US could handle. 35,000 tonnes of salmon were stuck in freezers in Norway, and that was a problem.
Chapter 7: What was the significance of Scotland's women's hockey match in Berlin during the Cold War?
And of course all the markets knew this, so the prices really collapsed. and half of the fish farmers in Norway went bankrupt, the risk was that the whole salming industry would go bankrupt and it would be the end of the farming history.
With the situation so difficult, there was a massive push to sell up to 12,000 tonnes of the salmon to one of Japan's largest seafood companies for use in traditional cooking, not sushi. But I stopped it. I got the ambassador with me and we talked with the Minister of Foreign Affairs on the telephone, I remember very well.
And we said, if you allow this, that could destroy everything that we've done in building up a new reputation of Norway salmon for sushi and sashimi. And we also will lose face because we had said to the Japanese industry that we will cooperate. We will not compete with you on your issues. But instead, we had to come up with something.
And we then made an agreement with a company called Nichirei that was specialized in frozen products.
Chapter 8: What memorable experiences did Laurel and Hardy have during their Christmas in England?
And they agreed to buy 6,000 or 5,000 tons and market and sell it and pack it as salmon for sushi and sashimi. The Norwegians now had the backing of a major Japanese company that could help market their salmon as they had intended. Yet it was another event that would eventually have a bigger impact on how the Japanese consumed raw salmon.
After a decade of rapid growth, Japan's economic bubble burst at the start of the 1990s. Here's how the BBC's Money Programme reported this in October of 1990.
So far, most of the blood has been spilled here in Tokyo's stock market. A year ago, it was proudly boasting it was the world's largest. Since then, it's fallen by 40%. Higher interest rates triggered a crash. which took almost everyone in Japan completely by surprise. Sushi was rather expensive in the restaurants in Japan.
And when the economic crash came, the use of this conveyor belt sushi became popular because they could sell the sushi cheaper. And that meant that families could start going out and eat sushi. And on the conveyor belt, when the fish goes around... The children just can grasp things, and they didn't have this kind of negative attitude towards salmon and salmon.
So when they saw this orange or golden fish passing by, they took it, and they liked it. They liked it very much. And then, of course, the mother tasted it and thought, oh, this is good. So it kind of exploded. Björn Eirik left Tokyo in 1994 when his role in marketing Norwegian salmon as sushi came to an end, and he returned to Norway.
He was quietly optimistic that salmon sushi had been established on the Japanese menu, but he wasn't 100% sure. When I came back in the summer 1995, half a year after I retired from the embassy, I went to one of the sushi shops in Ginza. In the window outside, they have these plastic copies of all the food they serve.
And then I saw for the first time these sushi nigiri with the orange Norwegian salmon topping. And then I realized that now it's really a breakthrough when even these fabrics that make the lookalike sushi or plastic, are now making the salmon nigiri. Today, salmon is one of the top fish choices in sushi restaurants, not only in Japan, but around the world.
When you do put some effort into a vision, to see it come true will make you happy. But also because I love Japanese culture, and to see that the Japanese culture has merged with the part of Norwegian culture makes me very happy. Lars Bavanger was speaking to Bjorn Erik Olsson, the man who came up with the idea of putting raw salmon on sushi rice.
So that was the introduction that Norway made to the world of sushi. But how else has that particular style of Japanese cuisine changed throughout history? Nancy Singleton Hachisu is a cookbook author who's lived in Japan since 1988. So what are the origins of sushi? Because it is a very distinctive style of food. Well, it's been around since prehistoric times.
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