29 The yellowed rice incident in 1952
After WW2, Japan had to import foreign rice because of poor harvest and logistics.
And some of rice imported was contaminated with mold then it caused a major food scandal in Japan.
People became terrified of anything that looked even slightly off-white.
Yellowish rice meant danger in their minds.
After that, many sushi restaurants grew afraid that customers would suspect
they were using moldy rice if their sushi rice wasn’t perfectly white.
So, quietly, they stopped using akazu.
Because, akazu makes sushi rice colored brown, not pure white color of fresh rice.
Since then for a long time, white vinegar became the norm.
Akazu slipped into the background.
“Time passes,” Mr. O said.
“People forget—even their own fears.”
Roughly eighty years went by.
The scandal faded from public memory.
And in Tokyo, a new wave of “back to tradition” thinking began to rise.
Chefs started to look back at the roots of authentic style of sushi.
They rediscovered AKAZU—not as something suspicious,
but as a symbol of heritage and depth.
According to some critics,
out of roughly three thousand sushi shops in Tokyo,
around ten percent now use AKAZU-based rice again.