Almost every guide to sashimi tells you what it is. Very few tell you what to do when the plate arrives — which piece first, what to do with the wasabi, whether the shredded daikon is food or decoration, and why one slice has a scorched edge. This is that guide, written from how it is actually eaten in Japan rather than how it is explained abroad.
One thing to settle first: sashimi is not sushi. Sushi is defined by vinegared rice — the fish is optional, and plenty of sushi has none. Sashimi is the fish alone, and the entire craft lies in the cut, the temperature, and the order. Removing the rice removes the place to hide.
The wasabi rule (this is the one people get wrong)
Do not stir wasabi into your soy sauce. It is the single most common mistake, and the reason is chemical rather than ceremonial: the pungency of wasabi comes from volatile compounds that disperse within minutes of being released, and dissolving them into liquid disperses them faster. A brown slurry of soy and wasabi tastes salty and vaguely hot. It does not taste of wasabi.
What to do instead: place a small amount of wasabi directly on the piece of fish, then dip the edge of the fish — not the wasabi side — briefly into plain soy sauce. Turn the piece so the fish, not the wasabi, meets your tongue first.
How much soy sauce: far less than you think. A touch on one corner. Sashimi that arrives dripping has been oversauced, and the point of a good white fish is a texture and sweetness that soy sauce will simply erase.
Some fish should get no soy sauce at all. If the chef has already brushed a slice, salted it, or set a wedge of sudachi or a dab of grated ginger beside it, that piece is finished — the seasoning is the instruction. Fatty tuna and seared items often come pre-seasoned this way.
The order to eat in
Sashimi is arranged, not piled. A platter is built so that it can be eaten from light to strong, and eating it in that order is the difference between tasting five fish and tasting one fish five times.
- White fish first — sea bream, flounder, sea bass. Lean, faintly sweet, easily destroyed by anything eaten before it.
- Then silver-skinned fish — horse mackerel, gizzard shad, mackerel. More oil, more assertive, usually served with ginger or spring onion rather than wasabi.
- Then red fish — tuna, bonito. Strong iron flavour.
- Shellfish and roe wherever they are placed — scallop, whelk, sea urchin, salmon roe sit outside the light-to-strong line and act as punctuation.
- Seared and fatty pieces last — they coat the palate and end the sequence.
Between two strong fish, eat some of the shredded daikon. That is what it is for.
What is actually on the plate
Most of what looks like garnish is food, and each element has a name and a job.
- Tsuma — the nest of finely shredded daikon radish. Eat it. It is a palate cleanser between fish and it is cut that fine specifically so it collapses without chewing.
- Ooba — the large serrated green shiso leaf. Edible, sharply aromatic, and often used as a mat under oily fish. Wrapping a piece of horse mackerel in a torn corner of it is a normal thing to do.
- The small chrysanthemum — traditionally there for its mild antibacterial properties. It is not eaten whole. Strip a few petals into your soy sauce with a fingertip, or leave it alone; both are correct.
- Grated ginger, myoga, spring onion — paired with oily or strong-smelling fish, never with delicate white fish. If ginger has been placed next to a piece, use it instead of wasabi.
The little wooden tags
On a large platter you will often see thin wooden markers pushed into the daikon, each with a fish name written on it. These are shinamei-fuda — name tags — and they exist because a good platter changes with the season, so the kitchen cannot assume you know what you are looking at.
Read as a set, the tags are a calendar. Every name on them corresponds to a window of a few weeks when that fish is at its fattest, and a restaurant that changes its tags is telling you it changes its buying.
Why some pieces have a scorched edge
That is aburi — the surface seared briefly with a flame or a hot skewer while the interior stays raw. It is done for a reason that varies by fish. On fatty tuna or salmon it melts the surface fat and makes it aromatic. On sea bream with the skin left on, it softens skin that would otherwise be too tough to eat raw. On mackerel it takes the edge off a smell that some people find too strong.
A seared piece is usually seasoned already. Check before you reach for the soy sauce.
Beyond fish
Sashimi in Japan is not limited to fillets of fish, and the items that surprise visitors most are the ones that are entirely ordinary locally.
Ikezukuri — a fish or lobster prepared so that the body is sliced and reassembled in its own shell or skeleton, head and tail intact. It is a demonstration of freshness and of knife work, and it is one of the genuine cultural boundaries in Japanese food: entirely normal in a Japanese coastal restaurant, difficult for many overseas diners. If it is not for you, it is simply not ordered — nobody will think anything of it.
Sazae (turban shell) — firm, mineral, slightly bitter at the back end. Served raw sliced, or grilled in its own shell with sake and soy.
Uni (sea urchin) is the animal’s gonad, not its flesh, which is why the taste is closer to cream than to fish and why quality varies so wildly. Ikura and sujiko are both salmon roe and are not the same thing: sujiko is the intact egg sac, taken earlier and cured whole, denser and more strongly salted; ikura is the eggs separated from the membrane and marinated individually. If a menu distinguishes them, it is not being fussy.
Fish on the calendar
Some sashimi is not eaten because someone fancied it. It marks a date.
Okuizome — around a hundred days after a baby is born, a meal is laid out that the child cannot yet eat, with a whole sea bream at the centre. It is a wish that the child will never go hungry. The fish must be whole, head and tail attached, because a complete fish signifies a complete life.
Toshitori-zakana — the fish eaten at New Year, and the clearest food boundary in Japan. In eastern Japan it is salmon. In western Japan it is yellowtail. The line between them runs roughly along the Itoigawa–Shizuoka Tectonic Line, the geological seam that also separates two halves of the country’s dialects, electricity frequencies and mochi shapes. Ask a Japanese person which fish their family eats at New Year and you will usually locate where their grandparents lived.
Buri changes its name as it grows. Yellowtail is a shusse-uo — a promotion fish — with a different name at each size, and the names differ by region: in Tokyo wakashi, inada, warasa, buri; in Osaka tsubasu, hamachi, mejiro, buri. This is why it appears at New Year in the west: a fish that is promoted through life is an auspicious thing to eat at the start of a year. It is also why hamachi and buri on a menu are the same species at different stages, and taste noticeably different.
One safety note
Raw fish carries a real, small risk from anisakis, a parasitic larva. Two things are worth knowing, because both are widely misunderstood.
First, what does not kill it: vinegar, salt, soy sauce and wasabi. Marinating in any of them is not a control measure, whatever the folklore says. What does work is freezing at minus twenty degrees Celsius for twenty-four hours or more, or heating to seventy degrees (sixty degrees for a full minute) — which is why commercially frozen fish is genuinely safer raw than fish that has never been frozen.
Second, what it feels like. The common form causes severe stomach pain, usually within a few hours and almost always within twelve, often with nausea. It is not a slow-building upset. Sudden intense abdominal pain in the hours after eating raw fish is worth taking to a doctor rather than waiting out — it is treated by removing the larva endoscopically, and it resolves quickly once that is done.
In practice, restaurants in Japan handle this as routine and the risk at any established place is very low. It is worth knowing mainly so that you recognise it if it happens, and so that you stop believing the wasabi is protecting you.
Next: what Japanese fishmongers actually mean by fresh →
Or: why sushi has seasons →