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It is 1982 and word in the United States is that the Japanese have made a sushi robot. The newspaper headlines had a blast. You can have sushi robot for a mere 1.6 million yen. Or Japanese shops resist tide of automation or Sushi shop owners at sea over robot in Japan. And when the machine first obtained export clearance to the United States, we got the gem. Sushi robot invasion slices into West Coast. My initial impression of the first sushi robot was that it did something with the fish, cutting it or something. I was wrong. The first sushi robot was a rice machine. In today's video, we go back yet again to my favorite carb and discuss the machine that industrialized the art of sushi. This video is brought to you by the Astronomatry Patreon. So where does sushi come from? Well, let me start you off with a story. Imagine the river regions of Southeast Asia, in Myanmar and Northeast Thailand, where rice paddy cultivation first emerged. There grew rice and flooded paddies, and freshwater fish like carp soon found their way into the paddies during the monsoon floods. And then soon enough, rice paddy farmers were cultivating and catching the fish for food. The broad understanding is that early forms of sushi began as a way to preserve fish meat in the humid heat. The process is simple. Take a gutted and cleaned piece of fish or shellfish, salt it, and then pack cooked rice around it. And then press the whole culinary concoction under a rock for maybe two months or longer. After some time, the rice produces a sour lactic acid that permeates through and preserves the fish meat. We call this nare sushi, which means matured or fermented sushi. Han Chinese visitors visiting Southeast Asia picked it up, and through them, it eventually made its way to Japan. It was likely established by the year 718 AD when it or something like it was mentioned in a Japanese government tax document. A variation called funatsushi is still eaten today, though it is not quite as popular because its sour taste and rather weird look does not quite appeal to modern palettes. So now this is all a nice clean story. And most commonly cited has sushi's origin story. But the fact is that nobody really knows. We have no archaeological evidence, just ancient writings and guesswork. This is feeble evidence indeed. We have issues just tracking down how sushi came to the United states less than 100 years ago and figuring out who invented the California roll. Going back a thousand years? Not a chance. So Japanese scholars chose this particular explanation because they presumed that sushi's ancestors needed both rice and fish, and looked for ancient societies with both. Regardless, most people seem to agree that sushi as we know it today began in Japan as a method of fermenting and or preserving fish, if not with rice than with something else like millet. So how did nara zushi become the sushi that we know and love today? Again, nobody knows. The generally accepted story is that nara zushi did not much catch on because of the long preparation time as well as the taste. As the name implies, the rice ends up extremely sour when you eat the thing you scraped off the rice. A story written in the 12th century Heian period noted that that you wouldn't notice if vomit was mixed in. At some point in the 1400s, Japanese cooks shortened the fermentation period to create nama narutushi, nama meaning raw in Japanese, implying that the fish was being taken out maybe a month earlier and eaten together with the rice. The shortened fermented period helped make this food more popular. Then in the 1600s, cooks start introducing vinegar, perhaps in an attempt to further accelerate the fermentation progress. Ergo, the name haya sushi, or fast made sushi. At some point in the early 1800s, the fermentation was entirely removed for vinegared rice. The sushi most people recognize is nigiri zushi, a piece of fish tinged with wasabi, lightly pressed into a small mound of vinegared rice. The chef most frequently credited with inventing this style was Hanaya Yohei. He started selling it out of his porch in the city of Tokyo, or edo, in the 1820s and then opened a food stall and restaurant. The style was an instant hit in Edo and rapidly spread to the rest of Japan. Perhaps because the Great kanto earthquake of 1923 displaced many Edo sushi chefs and forced them to set up in other regions. Now, producing a nigiri sushi involves two separate tasks. First is the preparation of the fresh fish or neta. Get the fish, cut it up. Whoop dee doo. Who cares? It's just a fish, bro. Let's move on. The second task is the rice. Now, this is the special part. The rice itself is called the shari. It is kept warm at about body temperature and lightly vinegared when prepared for the sushi, it is called the shari dama, which literally means rice jewel, by the way. I had quite a journey tracking down what the actual heck to call this thing, and apparently I was not alone. Writers and reporters over the years have called it rice balls, rice fingers, rice lumps, or just rice. Anyway, the preparation of the rice lump demands exquisite technique and is seen as an art in of itself. A good sharidama is firm on the outside, firm enough to be picked up with chopsticks, but also soft and airy enough on the inside to break apart inside your mouth. To make it, traditionally, the chef first wets his fingers in a bowl of vinegar water mixture. Then he, and it is almost always a he picks up just the right amount of rice from the tub via fill. Then, with a very light boat shaped grip, sometimes called a ukashi nigiri or literally floating grip, the chef swiftly puts together the sharidama with a series of quick, precise presses. It is said that it takes a sushi chef about four to five years to learn and master this technique. At its peak, a chef can produce about 300 to 350 Sharidama per hour. Which sounds like a lot, but as it turns out, not enough. In 1958, a small sushi shop owner named Shirayashi Yoshiaki opened the first conveyor belt sushi restaurant, Mawaru Gunroku Sushi. He was apparently inspired by a trip to either a meat packing or beer bottling factory. The concept really rolled out after the 1970 World Fair in Osaka. But the conveyor belt sushi boom caused a shortage of sushi masters with the necessary years of training. So what was to be done? In 1955, an entrepreneur named Kisaku Suzuki started a company called Suzumo. At the beginning, Suzumo's machines focused on confectionery making. Like for example, an ice cream filling machine, the SM2, or another machine for monaka, which is a Japanese sweet made from a red bean paste injected between two crisp wafers. I suppose you can call it a wafer to wafer bonding. But at some point during the 1970s, Suzumo started going through challenges with their suites and confectionary machines. The small 50 employee company needed a new market to survive. One thing that I think I can confidently say about this guy Suzuki is that he really likes rice. Suzumo's logo proudly declares we love rice. And Suzuki sees rice as a pillar of Japanese culture. In a 1993 interview, he declared that his dream plan was to spread rich rice culture. No protein diet for this fellow. In the 1960s, changing diets and new, more productive green revolution farming techniques led to rice oversupply situations that damaged rice farmers. So in 1970, the Japanese government set up the Rice Acreage Control System, or gentan. In it, the government sets a national rice production limit based on projected demand. In such a scheme, the government might even pay rice farmers not to plant their rice paddies to avoid going over the limit. I covered the gentan in a prior video about the ongoing Japanese rice price crisis. Enforcing the gentan can get confrontational with farmers who want to grow rice but aren't allowed to. In 1976, Suzuki watched about one such clash on TV, and it set him off. Having grown up During World War II, he experienced profound hunger and starvation, and now the government was paying farmers not to grow food. He began thinking about ideas to stimulate rice consumption in Japan. And one such idea was to make quality sushi more accessible and affordable to ordinary folks via automation. According to a 2002 interview with one of his employees, Suzuki one day suddenly told the confectionery is over. Make a machine for rice and make it a nigiri sushi machine. No one else has made one yet. The employees had no idea how to do this. Up until then, people presumed that a sushi's rice balls can only be made with a chef's careful hands. After many years of learning the craft, nevertheless, they got to carrying it out. The machine had to be simple to operate, highly productive, and easy to disassemble and clean. Suzumo's engineers began development by filming a sushi chef's hands and trying to replicate the movements mechanically. After two years, they showed the first robot prototype to a team of sushi chefs. The chefs hated the results. They said it was not sushi. They thought it was more like a rice dumpling or an older, more ancestral form of sushi called pressed sushi or oshi sushi. The second prototype worked far better. First, rice is fed into the machine from the top via a hapa. The machine then fluffs up the rice using a series of rotating loosener and scraper bars. This is crucial in getting the air pockets that sushi lovers desire. Then the machine measures and rolls out a small oval shaped ball of rice. The rice ball then rolls down a conveyor belt where it is gently pressed into shape from both the horizontal and vertical directions by metal molds. This was a definite improvement. But again, the sushi chefs were not satisfied. Saying that the rice oval was still too firm, one suggested to somehow emulate the elasticity of the palm of a human hand. The Susumo team said, yes, Chef. And after a long trial and error process, they discovered that they can replicate this elasticity using the soft silicone used for the nips of a baby bottle. That was the final piece. The machine, called the ST77, was completed in September 1981. Suzumo's original marketing name for the ST77 was the rather drab Edomae Sushi Automatic Nigiri Machine. To publicize the machine, the ST77 was featured on afternoon television in October 1981, where it competed in a 40 person taste test against a real nigiri sushi chef. It performed wonderfully, leading to a swarm of media coverage. Later, the famous Fuji TV host Masataka Itsumi dubbed it the Sushi Robot, and the nickname stuck. Robot purists might claim that it ain't a robot, but I reckon since it got hands and claws, the moniker works anyway. The sushi robot perfectly meshed with the booming conveyor belt Sushi industry. The ST77 can produce up to 1,200 sharidamas per hour, four times higher than a human. The chef can then focus on applying the wasabi and the fish mollusk or fish eggs. Yes, there were some concerns. Akinori Narasawa, who worked for the aforementioned Genroku Conveyor Belt restaurant, said in a 1982 interview, People think of sushi as a handmade product and it's going to be hard to change that image. He also worried that the robots will make sushi into a uniformly bland experience, but the machine's economics were too compelling to disregard. The ST77 slashed the per sushi production cost from an estimated $1.50 to just 50 to 70 cents in $1994. The Suzumo sushi robot hit the market in January 1982 at a price of 1.6 million yen, or $6,900. Susumo was prepared to sell about 20 units per month, but received one hundred and twenty unit orders right off the bat. Like I said, the machine's first customers were sushi shops. But soon after that, Suzumo started receiving inquiries from entrepreneurs lacking any prior sushi experience but wanting to start their own restaurant. In a rare 1993 interview, Suzuki said, we get inquiries from many places, from people saying, I want to open a sushi shop, and most of them think they can do it immediately if they just have a sushi robot. However, that's not the reality. I advise them it will be too difficult with just the sushi robot, so you should stop. But for those with the right mindset and the right shop location, Suzumo would back them 100%. Suzuki continues, we established two operations centers at our headquarters and our Tokyo factory so they can study the know how before setting up the machines in their actual store. From how to handle the hardware to business strategy, store design, and even methods for Sourcing ingredients. We can provide guidance on everything. There is not a single shop that has introduced our machinery and started a sushi shop whose business has failed. Susumo's success in the conveyor belt sushi industry brought competitors. Throughout the 1990s, at least eight companies introduced their own sushi robots. The two most significant are Tomoe Engineering and Atec. Tomoe Engineering was a spin off from a food service company called Tomoe Food Service, which ran a sushi restaurant. Facing their own labor shortage issues, they produced a small machine that bloomed into a whole line of business. They are smaller but well respected and some articles seem to say that their device came out even before Susemos in 1980. Autek is the other major competitor, the second largest in the market actually by some estimates, and this is a weird one, Autek's parent company is Audio Technica, the Japanese maker of headphones, microphones and turntables. Founded in 1962, Audio Technica's initial core products were or high end record player cartridges, essentially the needles for phonographs. But in the 1980s, Philips released the CD, spoiling the phonograph business. So what to do? Well, Audio Technica's founder Hideo Matsushita really loved sushi and since they were already trying a lot of things, he suggested sushi robots. Their first sushi ball machine, the ASM50, came out in 1984. It was a bright colored hand powered cooking toy for kids to make sushi rice balls at home. You turned a handle and balls came out. The toys became unexpectedly popular. Families used them to throw these sushi parties at home. Customer feedback eventually motivated the company to produce more advanced commercial machinery like the ASM430. In the end, Audio Technica's audio division successfully went into headphones and such. And that is their core business. Today, ATEC remains a part of the overall company, contributing about 10% of revenue. Despite having little or no synergy with the core business. It is just something they do on the side and they seem cool. With that, Suzumo nevertheless continues to be number one and has since rolled out a whole line of Sushi robots. In 1991, Suzumo produced the robot that automated the production of the Nori roll, where fish and vegetables are rolled along with rice and seaweed using a bamboo mat. Humans had to learn precise rhythmical hand motions to roll these. Some Tsuchi masters would spend three to 10 years to master the skill. Today's Noribots can do 900 to 1,300 rolls and in an hour, Suzumo also produced the robot for producing the inari sushis made from vinegar rice inside a tofu pouch. I love these. And Today the modern SSN JLA can produce 4800 rice lumps or whatever you want to call it per hour and can be fitted with attachments to help create other types of sushi, like the Gunkan battleship type sushis. Other improvements came in the form of discretionary Most early machine orders came from takeaway shops and fast food sushi restaurants. There, the bulky, blocky looking ST77, about 1 meter wide and 1 meter tall, can be hidden from sight. But fewer orders came from higher end sushi restaurants. Store owners there worried that customers won't eat sushi made by a machine sitting at the counter next to them. So in the mid-1990s, Suzuki told the Suzumo team to redesign the machine so that it can fit inside a standard sized rice tub or ohitsu. So all the customer sees is the sushi chef reaching into the tub and pulling out a pre made rice ball or rice finger. The new machine was called the SSG GTA or Sushi Chef's Helper and was released in 1999 after a five year development period. It makes me now wonder how many sushi restaurants I've been to that use this machine and I just never noticed it. Susumo continues to command a sizable share of the sushi robot market, though precise estimates are not available. Maybe anywhere from above 60% to as high as 85. But in line with their slogan, they consider themselves a rice device company. So over the years they have expanded their robot lineup beyond just sushi, like dispensary machines that put rice into rice bowls. A personal favorite of mine is the machine that produces the patties for the rice burgers that I see at Moss Burger. They're actually quite good, so go try them. The company is now led by one of Suzuki's descendants, Minako Suzuki, and their goal continues to be getting more people to eat and enjoy rice both in Japan and all over the world. Okay, I am done. I want to go eat sushi now. That's it for tonight. Thanks for watching. Subscribe to the channel, Sign up for the Patreon and I'll see you guys next time.