It’s our single favourite Asian food today, but how did sushi make its way to our shores? And what makes our version unique? 

In 2019, the Asia New Zealand Foundation began asking New Zealanders what word first comes to mind when they hear “Asia”, as part of its annual New Zealanders’ Perceptions of Asia and Asian Peoples survey. “Food” has been in the top two words in every poll since, and consistently outranks travel, people, art and history as New Zealanders’ top Asia-related interest.

In a recent survey, the Foundation sought to find out which food or meal takes the cake. 

While selecting from an entire (and enormously diverse) continent’s worth of food is no easy task, New Zealanders made it clear that sushi, with its subtle flavourings and emphasis on a few key ingredients, deserves the top spot as Aotearoa’s single favourite “Asian” food.

But when did sushi first make its way to these shores? And what makes New Zealand sushi special? 

Sushi is now such a ubiquitous lunchtime staple that it’s easy to forget that only a few decades ago, many New Zealanders were clumsily contending with chopsticks and reveling in the exotic novelty of raw fish while copies of Marian Keyes’ Sushi for Beginners flew off Whitcoulls’ shelves and into piles of summer reading.     

While sushi may be the first thing that comes to mind when many New Zealanders think of Japan, its popularity and evolution in Aotearoa, as in the United States, have also been shaped by successive waves of migration from Asia, and migration from Korea in particular.

Following World War II, but before making it to the American mainstream, more traditionally Japanese sushi could be found in Los Angeles’ “Little Tokyo”, in restaurants owned and frequented by Japanese locals, explains Changzoo Song, senior lecturer at the University of Auckland, who has studied the global history of sushi. By the 1970s and 80s, sushi had become a food of choice among two very different parts of American society: guests dining at New York’s Harvard Club, and those swept up in the hippie movement. Largely confined to these two subcultures, it represented both elite sophistication and a rejection of western culture.

Changes to US immigration law in 1965 saw an influx of Korean migrants arriving in Los Angeles. Korean restaurants sprung up in enclaves, but faced strong internal competition and business was limited mostly to other Koreans. 

As earlier Japanese migrants retired from business and second-generation Japanese Americans sought out careers outside of hospitality, these new Korean arrivals picked up the sushi mantle. “They realised that sushi restaurants were more profitable, and Koreans knew how to make sushi because they have kimbap,” says Dr Song. 

Kimbap, or gimbap, is similar conceptually to sushi, but with different fillings and rice seasoning. Koreans learnt how to make it – and adapt it by adding things like barbeque – during Japan’s colonisation of Korea, explains Dr Song. 

This modified sushi began to attract mainstream American appeal in the 80s and 90s, and eventually made its way to Aotearoa. By the time New Zealand’s first revolving sushi train opened in 1993 – Wasabi on Wellington’s Willis Street (not to be confused with the present Willis Street takeaway sushi shop of the same name) – food critic David Burton, whose reviews still hang proudly on many a Wellington restaurant wall, was wondering what took so long. “That a sushi bar has appeared in downtown Wellington is not surprising; it is only amazing that no entrepreneur ever brought the idea back from Los Angeles or London in the 1980s, at the height of yuppiedom,” he wrote in a 1994 review of the establishment. 

But it was St Pierre’s, started by three Greek-New Zealander brothers, that “imported” at scale this fusion form of sushi in Aotearoa in the early 1990s. The chain has continued to provide a template for the emergence of “‘Kiwi standard’ sushi,” write academics Rumi Sakamoto and Matthew Allen.

According to Sakamoto and Allen’s research, St Pierre’s, originally a delicatessen and seafood wholesaler, attempted to sell sushi in downtown Auckland. Sales at the stall proved disastrous until a Korean friend offered to don a Japanese kimono. The takeaway, according to the research, was that St Pierre’s needed to market the product as exotic and “Japanese” by hiring Asian staff who could pass as Japanese – something which became easier to do as changes to New Zealand’s own immigration law in 1987 enabled new waves of migration from Asia. 

Most sushi in Aotearoa is futomaki: rice and fillings rolled up in dried seaweed (nori) and tends to weigh more than double that found in Japan. Sakamoto and Allen attribute this to the efforts of chains like St Pierre’s to “recast” sushi as a healthy, value-for-money lunch option able to compete with other “ethnic” food court options. Sakamoto and Allen’s research points out that while many sushi restaurants trade on their Japanese-ness (even when they’re not Japanese owned) and notions of authenticity, flavours have also been adapted to local tastes and reflect local ingredients, with combinations like salmon and avocado or smoked chicken becoming overwhelmingly popular. 

“I had never had a salmon and avocado roll in Japan,” says Miku Fujisawa, who has been working in New Zealand for the past year. Another difference: while sushi in New Zealand is often eaten as a quick and easy lunch on the go, in Japan it’s a sit-down affair, either made to order by a sushi chef or served on a sushi train, says Miku. Although New Zealand sushi is a different experience to that found in her home country of Japan, she still enjoys New Zealand sushi and was surprised by the number of sushi shops around the motu. “Things like having cheese in sushi are really fascinating to me … Salmon in New Zealand is also brilliant, better than in Japan.” 

Indeed, it’s no coincidence that the rise of sushi in New Zealand coincides with the growth of our farmed salmon industry, points out David Burton.

The other key ingredient? According to Sakamoto and Allen’s research, Korean migrants have been a driving force behind the rise of sushi’s popularity in New Zealand. By the 2010s, more Auckland sushi restaurants were owned by non-Japanese than Japanese, a statistic not entirely surprising given that people identifying as ethnically Korean in Aotearoa were more than double those identifying as being of Japanese heritage in both the 2006 and 2013 census.   

And New Zealand sushi often bears more than a trace of its Korean producers. Dr Song recalls the story of Mr Shim, a Korean migrant who spent a year working for St Pierre’s before setting up his own, and possibly the first Korean-owned, sushi bar in Auckland’s city centre. Keen to deepen his understanding of sushi making, Mr Shim and his wife eventually travelled to Japan.

“[It was the] first time in their life to see [Japanese] sushi, which was a huge cultural shock, because almost all of what he had been making was nothing like sushi in Japan… Because sushi had developed in a totally different manner in the West,” Song says.

But as Song points out, a break with tradition can lead to creativity. He recalls a Korean-run Ōpōtiki sushi shop notable for its range of deep-fried sushi options.

Yet despite the culinary creativity, non-Japanese-owned sushi shops are often hesitant to move away from Japanese branding. St Pierre’s still has its “St Pierre’s presents sushi of Japan” logo, and pink cherry blossoms and Japanese writing remain common décor choices.  Ironically, it’s often these efforts to appear Japanese that end up giving the owners away. Dr Song has found that restaurants named after Japanese places or cultural icons like “Shogun”, “Sumo”, “Tokyo” or “Narita” are often actually owned by non-Japanese. 

But sushi in Japan is also evolving, says Helen Kono of Wellington’s Yoshi Sushi & Bento. “Sushi was developed in Japan, taken overseas where it evolved and has since been taken back to Japan … Fusion keeps things exciting and keeps people’s palettes interested.” 

New Zealand’s growing diversity and the nature of current immigration settings which favour “skilled” and professional migrants mean the owners of our sushi shops are also changing. “The sushi business is not dominated by only Koreans right now. It is very diverse [in terms of] people,” says Dr Song. And with the global rise of Korean pop culture, more Korean restaurants (and kimbap) are appearing across Aotearoa. 

Pak Chow Lee, who moved to Aotearoa from Malaysia as a 22-year-old, was the chef at Wasabi when it opened in 1993. He’s since started and sold numerous sushi shops, including Catch on Wellington’s Courtenay Place, and now owns the popular Tornado Sushi in Paraparamumu. Lee was inspired to learn how to make sushi after a trip to Japan. “I was stunned by the hundreds of revolving sushi bars in Japan, filled with people sitting and queuing. The atmosphere was so good with sushi just passing by. I thought, ‘this is fun.’” Having worked as a sheet welder in Singapore, Lee also had the technical know-how to renovate and construct rotating sushi trains himself. 

Sushi’s popularity, regardless of its maker’s origins, has also proven to be an important gateway to broader Japanese cuisine and culture, says Kono. Sushi’s popularity has allowed Yoshi to expand its offering to things like bento, a type of packed lunchbox common in Japan. “I remember when we added that, and I don’t think I’d seen that word [‘bento’] really in other signs or stores at all,” Kono says. “And so a lot of people were like, ‘What’s bento?’ We opened in 2010. Now a lot of people know what bento is. A lot of people know what karaage [a Japanese frying technique] means. So there’s not just the food culture, there’s words that they’re learning with it as well.”

“I will always try and hand things two handed, which is Japanese culture,” Kono adds, “and a lot of customers pick up on that. It’s a subtle way of learning another culture.”

“Kiwi standard” sushi is more than salmon and avocado – it also contains the melding of cultures and the migration histories of those who make it.

This feature was made with the support of Asia New Zealand Foundation.