How did Salmon become Sushi? Here is a great article in the Japanese Times from March 10, 2018 which explains how Atlantic Salmon became a popular fish used for Sushi.
Original article:
The Norwegian campaign behind Japan's love of salmon sushi
BY OEYSTEIN SOLLESNES
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
MAR 10, 2018
Look at the menu of any sushi shop in Japan and you will almost certainly see salmon: fatty, tender and bright orange. And for good reason, in a 2017 survey by the seafood company Maruha Nichiro, the fish was found to be the most popular neta (topping) for the sixth year in a row, ranked far higher than the more traditional tuna and halibut.
But salmon is a relatively new addition to the sushi menu making its rise to popularity remarkable, a story that is both an allegory of shifting taste trends across Japanese demographics and the opening of one of Japan’s most iconic cuisines, sushi, to the world.
So swift has been salmon’s success that there is a stark generational divide when it comes to which neta is preferred. Many older Japanese start with lean white fish and work their way up to tuna, while younger generations prefer salmon.
“20 years ago was when everything changed,” says Hideki Koike, the head chef at Masukomi Sushi Bar in Yurakucho, Tokyo. “There are still some restaurants without salmon,” he says. “But the demand is too great. You just have to serve it.”
Behind salmon’s rise to popularity is the lesser-known story of a carefully executed Norwegian marketing campaign: Project Japan.
“We set out to ‘inject’ Norwegian salmon into Japanese sushi,” says Bjorn Eirik Olsen who, in the late 1980s, was responsible for market research for Project Japan. He is now the general director of the Culture Business Development Foundation based in Tromso, Norway.
In the 1970s, Norway began commercial salmon farming but, with decreasing seafood consumption at home, salmon was soon filling industrial freezers across the country. By the late 1980s, Norway was in desperate need of a new market for its fish.
Japan, meanwhile, had been overfishing its waters to meet high consumption and, with Japanese fishermen told to remain within their exclusive economic zones by the United Nations, Japan began opening up its once nearly self-sufficient seafood industry to foreign suppliers.
The country stood out as an ideal market for Norwegian salmon. When Olsen landed in Tokyo in 1986, he took one look at Japanese seafood consumption habits and knew his target market.
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