A cool guide to sushi etiquette

I love seeing everyone try to reason their way out of accepting a polite request that literally says that it's not mandatory.

Bahaha fuck this I'll enjoy things as I please

I always find such guidelines strange. Like I get the intention is to share some experience, but I rarely find the intended way of anything enjoyable at all. Even western traditional etiquette is weird. I shall hold the fork in my right hand and you can't stop me aunty! My tea shall be hot juice! And my side shall be mixed with the sauce and meat into a big ol pile before consumption!

How the hell do i eat it in 30 seconds when it all arives at once?

Thats wild I'll eat it however I like

Nobody mixes wasabi with soy sauce. They mix horseradish paste that’s dyed green with soy sauce, because real wasabi is prohibitively expensive and most people have never actually had it, myself included.

Please shut the fuck up im trying to eat

Don't eat sushi, got it.

I have never seen a sign saying I shouldn't cut spaghetti, shouldn't order pizza Hawaii, must split the potato with a fork, must have the knife in my right hand, or that the different cutlery for side dishes are mandatory.

Might be different in a high class restaurant, but whatever.

The only things signs in restaurants tell me is either "we only serve real meat, pussies can beat it" and "we did indeed pass the last inspection, here's the grossest looking cartoon implying we shouldn't have".

So ketchup on sushi is acceptable

Yeah I don't believe most of these are real "big taboos" and will continue eating food the way it is most tasty to do, regardless, thanks.

So am I supposed to flip the sushi over to dip the fish side in the soy sauce? That seems a bit awkward

Wasabi and soy sauce one is a lie. You are also supposed to eat ginger before and after every dish

Unless you hand me a soy sauce pipette i'll just dip the rice part in the soy sauce, thank you very much.

And wtf is tiny tiny rice?

What's with the wasabi and soy mixing? I saw someone do that recently for the first time. He looked very confident at it and I assumed i had been doing it wrong all this time. Why is mixing a thing suddenly?

When I lived in Japan (around 15 years ago, so etiquette might have changed since then) it was common to take the fish off of the rice and dip it in soy sauce, then put it back on the rice bed in instances where it was just placed atop the rice. Likewise, it was perfectly fine to mix wasabi into your soy sauce.

I've done things that way since without any overt disdain, so I think these are generally good guidelines, but you can probably get away with doing some things your own way.

And why not chew it off? Is it like in church where you're not supposed to nibble your consecrated wafer?

I agree with the other things, though. And I feel like I'm supposed to repost the old "The Japanese Tradition" video on sushi: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bDL8yu34fz0 It's awesome. (And since satire doesn't always translate on the internet: It's a spoof.)

please do not chew off your sushi

Wow, the Japanese must have much bigger mouths than me

My question is...how do you eat it within 30 seconds? I get that this type of etiquette exists in many different cultures but while I have never eaten sushi, I don't exactly get how that one is even possible?

3 bucks for some extra wasabi and ginger?! That better be the real stuff for that price

Don't mix wasabi with soy sauce? So... chuck it into your mouth like a gumball?

Cool, so I can bring in a hotplate and sautee them before I eat them. No rule against that

This seems like one of those higher end sushi counters, where you get one or two pieces at a time. You generally shouldn't put rice in the soy sauce as the rice would fall apart. And you really shouldn't pass the sushi with your chopsticks to another set of chopsticks. All of the other things are fine in an izakaya setting. A colleague of mine who was in sales and had to make sure to cater to our customer's wishes was absolutely fine with mixing wasabi with the soy sauce for example. She one hundred percent knew about etiquette.