Reposting this question because it received no answers (and a fair amount of upvotes) a couple nights ago! Hopefully a quiet Sunday afternoon will prove to find some answer or further reading.
This question has been aching at me this week. Last year I read A History of East Asia: From the Origins of Civilization to the Twenty-First Century by Charles Holcombe. In his introductory chapter he cites Sasha Issenberg's The Sushi Economy to say that sushi was was first a street snack sold from street vendors in 19th c. "Edo-era Tokyo". However, my Japanese language professor said it dated back 800 years or so. In any case I went to my uni's library to go through Issenberg's book and couldn't find what Holcombe was citing, despite the page number being given and the only other relevant books at my university are in Japanese. So, this leads me back to my title.
Thanks in advance!
Pretty sure I was looking in the wrong place in Sushi Economy's introduction, because other reviews note Holcombe's point, but still didn't see citations for that in his intro notes IIRC.
The consumption of raw fish in Japan goes back for ages, to at least the Muromachi period (somewhere around 1300-1500AD). However, that sort of sushi is a very different style than the one we see today-for instance, the fish is fermented with rice (without vinegar, which is almost unthinkable today), whereupon the rice was discarded and the fish consumed. There are a few places in Japan that still have this kind of sushi today. In my completely unqualified opinion, from the one time I had it, it was pretty gross. Think like kimchi, except with fish instead of cabbage.
The modern "Edo-style" sushi was created around the 1800s, as per Sasha Iseenberg's assertation. This sushi was much more like the type we see today. To put this in perspective, Japanese soy sauce ("shoyu") only became popular around the 1600s after the Sengoku period, and the seaweed sheets that are used to prepare contemporary sushi ("nori") appeared in the Edo period after 1600.