Maki are sliced logs of rice-wrapped fillings held together by strips of nori seaweed. It's the familiar cuboid of lightly packed rice with perhaps a little wasabi and a strip of fish sitting on top. The classic sushi item is arguably the nigiri, which comes from a word meaning to squeeze. One of the many advantages of sushi spreading around the world is that women have been allowed to share in it properly. And an idiotic belief persists that women have warmer hands than men and thus might somehow the spoil fish by handling it. Until 1999 it was illegal for women in Japan to work after 10pm, which made employment in the restaurant industry almost impossible. They have almost no female chefs: Corson writes that male sushi chefs often believe 'makeup, body lotion, and perfume destroy the flavor of the fish and rice'.

The traditional ones discourage single women from dining in them altogether. Japanese sushi restaurants are sexist to an extent that would appal most westerners. More importantly, the food was at last opened to women. When I met Nobusan last week he showed me his latest idea: a DIY sushi box with the ingredients already prepped, a sensible move as, by far the hardest thing about making sushi is acquiring the knife skills.ДЄt whatever cost to quality, modern sushi restaurants broke down the rigid hierarchies of Japanese kitchens, where trainees spend perhaps three years on the rice before they touch any fish. More recently, a partnership between Robert De Niro and Nobu Matsuhisa has led to a scattering of beautiful and costly Japanese-themed restaurants around the world. Osho was next door to Twentieth Century Fox's studios, and that old scowler Yul Brynner soon became a regular. The new food was low-fat, high-protein and expensive вЂ“ perfectly suited to Hollywood. Little Tokyo in Los Angeles had had Japanese restaurants since the 1850s, but it wasn't until Osho opened near Beverly Hills in 1970 that the Americans began to embrace sushi. By the 1800s, then, Japanese people were eating fresh raw fish paired with rice that had been flavoured with sugar, salt and rice vinegar вЂ“ modern sushi. Rice vinegar appeared around 1600AD, allowing people to bring to rice many of the flavours it had previously only acquired from fermentation. Much later people started to eat the sour fermented rice with the fish, and as roads improved, all fish could be eaten fresher. You can still eat this historic form of sushi near Kyoto and in Thailand and Taiwan. The rice fermented into alcohol and acids and kept the fish edible for up to a year. Trevor Corson writes in his slow but earnest The Story of Sushi that people living along the Mekong river a few thousand years ago would pack cleaned, gutted fish in jars with cooked rice.

Japan's original sushi вЂ“ cobbled, like its architecture, writing, chopsticks and much else, from the mainland вЂ“ was in fact a method of preservation. To have a sushi restaurant you either need to live very close to the sea, as many Japanese people do, or you need sophisticated systems of transport and refrigeration that can jet iced bluefin around the planet. That movement is very young, as should be obvious from a moment's thought. America's earliest sushi customers were Japanese, so the modern sushi movement вЂ“ whatever its subsequent corruptions вЂ“ was far more authentic and intriguing. The first Indian menu in London was muted and truncated for its 19th-century clientele, and most Indian food here, like Chinese, bears scant relation to its original. It combines the meshing of cultures, the emancipation of women, groundswells in technology and rampant and conflicted globalisation. The rise of sushi around the world is one of most interesting stories in food.

Osho sushi