The Man Who Wants You to Stop Drowning Your Tuna in Soy Sauce
I eat sushi wrong. Have been eating it wrong for years. I’d mix the wasabi directly into the soy sauce, pile it on, dip the rice side down and let it soak. Eating like someone grateful for the experience rather than someone who understands it. Then I watched Naomichi Yasuda explain how it’s actually done, and I felt the particular shame of realizing I’d been mishandling something I genuinely love for a very long time.
Yasuda ran a sushi restaurant in New York for years and became something of an evangelist for eating the stuff in a way that lets you taste what the chef actually made. The wasabi is placed by hand between fish and rice—mixing more into the soy sauce buries everything under heat and salt. The correct dip is fish-side down, briefly, if at all. One bite, fish to tongue first. No rubbing chopsticks together like starting a fire; that’s an insult to the restaurant. Lean fish early, the fattier cuts later as the palate opens up. None of it is complicated. All of it changes the experience.
The closest I’ve come to understanding sushi the way it’s meant to be understood was at a counter in Tokyo where the chef handed me each piece and watched me eat. Not with visible judgment—or maybe with judgment, quiet enough that I didn’t notice until later. That silence was the whole point. You’re supposed to be paying attention to the fish, not your conversation, not your phone. The ritual exists because the food is too good to use as background.
Good sushi shouldn’t need much of anything added to it. That’s the entire argument, really. The fat in a piece of fatty tuna, the clean mineral taste of sea urchin, the way a properly seasoned rice falls apart at exactly the right moment—all of that disappears under a puddle of dark soy and a blob of undifferentiated wasabi heat. Yasuda’s case isn’t about snobbery. It’s about not wasting something worth paying attention to.
Watch the video, feel briefly embarrassed about your own habits, then actually change them. That’s the implicit bargain, and it’s a fair one.