42 – A Broken Way of Training Sushi Chefs
For decades, the common story in Japan went like this:
3 years before you’re allowed to cook rice properly.
5 years before you can even think about sushi rice.
A lifetime to “truly” learn how to shape nigiri.
Behind the romantic image of the stern master and the loyal apprentice,
there was a harsher reality:
Endless hours of work in the kitchen
Very little structured teaching
Being shouted at more often than being taught
Low pay, few days off, and almost no clear path forward
Under those conditions, fewer and fewer young people wanted to become sushi chefs.
The industry was slowly starving itself of new talent.
The founder of Tokyo Sushi Academy, where I studied, saw this as a real danger.
He believed the problem wasn’t that young people were “weak.”
The problem was that the training system was broken.
Instead of “Watch me for ten years and maybe I’ll show you something,”
he wanted to create a place where sushi could be taught:
ーFrom the ground up
ーSystematically
ーLogically
That vision became Tokyo Sushi Academy—
a school that has now trained sushi chefs working in more than 40 countries.
In an industry dominated by vague apprenticeship myths,
this school was an innovation:
it proved that with the right curriculum and discipline,
the fundamentals of sushi can be learned in about a year,
and that people can actually go on to open their own businesses.
(Founder’s Story 43
Breaking the “Three-Year Myth”)