Global Sushi: Soft Power and Hard Realities

Global sushi flows in multiple directions. In the past generation, sushi has spread outward from Japan throughout the globe, riding the wave of Japan’s soft power and “gross national cool.” Sushi has migrated across a culinary spectrum from exotic, inaccessible, and inedible, to occupy table space both as haute cuisine and take-out fast food, becoming an icon of post-modern global chic in the process. Simultaneously, the fishing industries around the world have been re-oriented. The Japanese fishing industry has expanded its activities in every ocean of the globe, local industries have been oriented toward Japanese markets, and more species have become targets for export to Japan and newly emerged secondary markets in metropolitan centers around the globe.

This lecture explores the sushi boom and the appropriations of sushi as popular culture, the interralationship between this projection of soft power and the hard realities of the global fishing industry, the conflicts over fishing rights and quotas, the environmental issues of overfishing, the impact of aquaculture, and the struggles to create global fisheries management regimes.