【Reading】やたいずし

【English Name】Street stall sushi

The street-vendor culture of selling sushi from movable stalls (yatai) set up on the roadside blossomed in the Edo period. The Great Fire of Meireki (1657) drew a large number of migrant laborers into Edo, sharply raising the demand for dining out that could quickly fill the stomach. What met that demand was stall food that could be finished in a short time, such as nigiri sushi, soba, and tempura.

The stalls lined up in places where people constantly came and going, such as the gates of temples and shrines, hirokoji (broad avenues), and hiyokechi (fire-prevention open spaces). The nigiri sushi of the time was about the size of a rice ball (onigiri), much larger than today's. It was a casual item to nibble one or two of on the way home from the bathhouse (yuya), a food that was a forerunner of what we now call fast food.

By the end of the Tenpo era (around 1844), peddlers (furi-uri) appeared who carried inari-zushi on a shoulder pole (tenbin-bo) and sold it around town. The "Kinsei Shobai Zukushi Kyoka Awase" published in Kaei 5 (1852) preserves an illustration depicting a stall cutting and handing long inari-zushi to customers. Around the same time, rolled sushi (maki-zushi) also took hold in the city and came to be widely enjoyed.

What put an end to this stall culture was the strengthening of hygiene regulations that advanced during the postwar high-growth period. On the occasion of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, stalls deemed unsanitary were swept out of urban areas, and the sight of selling sushi on the roadside vanished. Thereafter, sushi settled into store-based restaurants and gradually acquired the standing of a high-class cuisine.