Hello! You have asked a question about one of the fields I feel I am very specifically trained to answer. I will start by recommending further reading by the scholar Samuel Yamashita on the topic of food in Japan. He was my advisor many years ago and part of the reason I can answer your question. Also, if you’re Japanese is solid then I would also recommend checking out some primary sources if you ever get the chance. I know it’s probably a long shot (just the language barrier is immense) but many diaries from the wartime period are still extant and are sometimes published here in Japan!

So, could a regular Japanese person eat sushi during the war?

First of all I hope you’ll indulge me in a little sushi history. Your California roll may not be traditional sushi, but I love talking about sushi so I would be so happy to share some history on it before I get into the depressing stuff. Sushi is referenced in texts as early as the 900s AD in texts chronicling the tax contributions of areas in western japan (for my Japanese readers you’re looking for 延喜式 in scrolls 24 and 25 under the contributions chronicled in 主計式). There is also a great, and absolutely disgusting reference in the “今昔物語集” in which a sushi selling woman gets violently ill from drinking and “vomited into her bucket of sushi, and becoming quite panicked mixed the contents up to cover up (her mistake).” Or the advice from a doctor on how to lose weight given to Fujiwara no Asahira who was worried about his obesity, only for Fujiwara to eat a lot of sushi in addition to his prescribed diet plan and not be able to lose any weight. You may have noticed from the vomit story though, this certainly wasn’t modern sushi as mixing in vomit into a bucket full of sushi was a possible way to hide that you had vomited in it. So what was sushi at this time? Well at this point sushi or “narezushi” as it would be more correctly known, was something that is called “funazushi” today in Shiga prefecture. It is essentially a way to preserve raw fish by essentially pickling it in a mixture of rice and salt. So, is there a chance someone ate this type of sushi during the war? Yes possible but not what you meant by sushi. However, for reasons I will talk about in a little bit I would have gone for this option sans vomit if you gave me the option. No, the sushi you’re talking about is modern sushi that first appears in written sources during the Edo period’s final stages in the 1829 柳多留 a publication of poems. Writing published in 1837 claims that sushi had appeared in Edo and become so popular so quickly that it had spread to Osaka soon after its popularization in Edo. If I showed you a sushi woodblock print by Utagawa Hiroshige printed in the mid 1800s you wouldn’t even need me to tell you which sushi is the shrimp sushi. Sushi is partially remarkable to me because it is so recognizable even from woodblock prints produced at around the same time that Abraham Lincoln was president. Do you think Lincoln was eating much raw fish in the white house? Because people on the street were eating sushi in Edo and Osaka by then that was visually indistinguishable from sushi you might eat today.

Anyway! Back to the point at hand. Were normal people eating sushi during the war? Perhaps early in the war when things weren’t so dire and austerity measures and rationing weren’t in effect. In the late stages of the war though I would seriously doubt any normal people were eating sushi. The late war situation in Japan was dire to put it very lightly. There are many documented cases of children, evacuated from cities to live as school groups in the country side, stealing unripe rice from fields because they were so hungry.

In the diary of a teenager I read as part of my research 馬鈴薯の青春 or literally “a youth of potatoes” the writer chronicles her meals every single day along with her daily struggles and life going from school to war munitions factory and then back home. By the later stages of the war rationing had become so severe that the writer mentioned an entire day’s food being half a potato on multiple occasions and a bowl full of rice would be considered a huge deal. The logistical issues of getting fresh enough fish to make sushi were already difficult in war (remember you can’t make raw sushi with river fish so you have to find time and resources to fish in the ocean). Add to that the fact that basically every able bodied man was already in the war effort and a non insignificant part of everyone else’s day was spent learning how to blow up tanks or running to air race shelters, there wasn’t a lot of time for fishing to satisfy a desire for luxury foods. In addition to rice, which was already in relatively short supply, sushi requires sugar and vinegar, which was also heavily rationed.