Thinly sliced raw fish on plain white rice.
How did this Japanese staple take over the world?
And what has a tuna-loving, controversial Korean religious leader got to do with it?
This is the story of sushi and the way of tuna.
It is hard to imagine how raw fish on sour rice
could have become an American staple.
Like, it is everywhere. So how could that have happened?
Uncooked fish is undeniably sushi's calling card,
but the name actually comes from a Japanese word, meaning sour rice.
Its origins trace back to China, at least as far back as 300 AD.
But it was a long way from dragon rolls and salmon nigiri.
They used to ferment fish in rice in order to preserve it.
The rice would go bad and they'd throw it away and just eat the fermented fish.
This came to Japan around 700 AD.
But sushi's biggest shift came with the invention of vinegar 100 years later.
Now it could be made instantly without waiting for the rice to pickle.
And it was kind of a fast food at that point.
The McDonald's drive-through of old Tokyo.
By the mid 1700s, in the largest city in the world, sushi
was one of the most popular street snacks.
In 1824, a street seller in Tokyo began hand-shaping his sushi to serve his customers quicker,
inventing something that resembles modern day nigiri.
Despite its popularity in Japan, sushi was rarely eaten abroad.
Then came World War Two.
The American post-war occupation of Japan brought in some strict food controls.
And they were trying to restart the restaurant business.
But the restaurants were not allowed to have any rice.
It was all rationed to citizens.
So the solution was citizens could bring their rice
to the sushi restaurant and have the chefs there make it into sushi.
This particular style of sushi from Tokyo spread through the whole country,
and the sushi industry was able to restart
before many other restaurant industries in Japan after the war, as a result.
While LA had long had a Little Tokyo, the US Immigration Act of 1965
opened the doors to a new wave of Japanese immigration.
New Japanese restaurants began to pop up, catering to the wealthy Japanese businessmen.
A slab of raw fish sitting on top of rice
was a little bit of a turn-off to Americans at that time.
And so was very dark green seaweed paper.
It wasn't something Americans were used to eating.
One Japanese entrepreneur decided to open a restaurant
near the Hollywood studios, hoping to attract some celebrity customers.
When the Hollywood stars discovered this exotic, interesting, weird meal,
it was kind of a thing they wanted to try out.
Frank Sinatra going with his entourage and eating sushi, it became a thing.
Meanwhile, across the continent,
in Gloucester, Massachusetts, home of the American fishing industry,
a controversial Korean religious leader, Sun Myung Moon,
was convinced that America could fall in love with fish.
He had had this kind of vision
that the food supply problems of the world could be solved
by harvesting more fish from the sea and spreading it all over the place.
He always loved fishing. He liked fishing and shooting,
but fishing particularly, and fishing for tuna fish.
But who was this mysterious preaching fisherman?
He was Reverend Moon and his followers, often called Moonies,
believed that he was the Messiah, the true father of mankind.
He was very forceful. He was very clever.
His followers adored him.
The newcomers learned to see Moon as their father.
They called him father and his wife mother.
He'd appear to them in dreams.
Moon founded the Unification Church in 1954 in South Korea.
By the 1970s, Moon was giving speeches across the US
and performing mass weddings where he handpicked the couples.
They were going round to say, "Who's John married to?"
"And who did you get?" They were marrying somebody
who they would never have met in great big mass ceremonies.
And so it was thought that he must be brainwashing them.
He was one of the least popular people in a whole lot of polls in America
in the seventies and eighties.
Moon had been born in Northern Korea under Japanese occupation
and was later imprisoned by the Communists during the Korean War.
His religion went hand-in-hand with his anti-communist ideology,
which helped him find support in the US.
He was very much in with the Republicans.
Wherever he could promote right-wing or anti-communist stance, he would do so.
And he would pay out for this.
He used his money for his political connections.
Moon saw his church as destined to rule the world.
He bought the conservative Washington Times newspaper as a mouthpiece.
And a US Congress investigation, even revealed links between Moon,
the Korean CIA and a political influence campaign.
And then he had another time in prison in America on tax evasion.
You could say that his fishing industry was religious especially.
Anything that was successful was God's success.
Anything that wasn't success was Satan.
So he had had all these followers, many of them actually from Japan,
had come to the US and
they had tried already to start selling fish to Americans.
It was a failure.
They were going around with little refrigerated vans
and trying to get people to buy frozen fish out of the back of the van,
and people were not that interested.
For the average American hooked on a diet of TV dinners
and processed meats, fresh fish didn't really feature.
But Moon was convinced that tuna was the key to changing the nation's tastes.
He was particularly obsessed with this idea that tuna could be the gateway
to their fish distribution spreading in the United States.
The cattle of the ocean, you know, the big red meated animal, right?
In 1980 Moon gathered 70 of his followers in the Church-owned New Yorker hotel.
He gave a long, bizarre sermon called The Way of Tuna,
calling them to spread sushi across the US.
Health crazes and the invention of the Americanised versions like
the California roll, were already pushing sushi into the mainstream.
And Moon invested in a lot of the sushi businesses.
Started in New York and the East Coast and then spread to Detroit to Chicago.
Popularity of sushi was clear as a business opportunity.
The United States, it didn't have the infrastructure
for taking care of dead fish in transit.
But the Church-run True World Foods did.
And Moon's followers were willing or pressured to work
incredibly long hours in difficult conditions to make it possible.
There was this accidental alignment that occurred where they had this network
of people willing to work long hours trying to sell fish
to spread this gospel and you had restaurateurs who needed fish.
True World Seafoods became this big conglomerate with tentacles
like an octopus everywhere all over the US.
Today, there are at least 4,000 sushi restaurants
across the US, where the industry is worth an estimated $27 billion.
Sun Myung Moon died in 2012.
But True World Foods lives on. Still transporting sushi-grade fish
from Tokyo's markets to sushi shops across the world.
He was certainly successful in getting the headlines the whole time
and in getting money and in getting
a considerable number of very loyal followers.
Was sushi popularised by the controversial religious leader,
or did his profit-driven church just capitalise on a rising trend?
One thing's for sure: his prophecies about tuna were right.
It's gone from trash fish to one of the most popular sushi ingredients all over the world.
But with many species now in decline from overfishing,
tuna's modern-day popularity may prove to be devastating.