Japan Travel in the Know: The Best Sushi Is There in the Middle of Hokkaido

Sushi and sashimi are Japanese specialty foods, and I believe they are definitely what many of the people coming from overseas look forward to eating in Japan.

How often do you think Japanese people eat sushi? According to one research, about 60% of us eat sushi at least once a month. Me? Much less than that because I don’t like sushi very much. I may as well eat in a high-class sushi restaurant once a year rather than in a cheap belt-conveyor sushi restaurant once a month. Originally, that’s what sushi was all about: a special meal for a special day. Do we really get happier by improving our standard of living like this?

To be more precise, I don’t like the smell of raw fish very much, though I like fishing. Funnily enough, I spend a lot of time to wait for fish to bite, while thinking over how to take a fish off the hook without touching it. In this way, people’s likes and dislikes are complicated, and the boundary between them is always obscured. In addition, as I wrote before, we ourselves can’t explain why we like/dislike something. What we can finally say is “We like it because we like it.” Nonetheless, all the marketers around the world keep making a daily effort in vain to solve this great mystery.

I just found a scientific article introducing an experiment that reveals how our taste changes. Have we solved the mystery at last? Not really. According to the experiment, we just have known how synapses work to change our taste, but we still don’t know how the electrical signals to drive our synapses occur. At this moment, probably I have no other choice but to reach the same conclusion wrote in my past article. We should try not to obsess ourselves to our taste because it’s too elusive and full of cognitive biases.

If there is no new discovery, why am I writing this article today? Do I want to emphasize my opinion again and again? No, no. I just want to introduce sushi in Asahikawa, my hometown. It’s located in the middle of Hokkaido. Hokkaido is famous for delicious seafood because it’s surrounded by the sea. What is more, the sea has some areas where the warm Black Current meets the cold Kurile Current. The collision of the currents grows a lot of planktons, which makes the areas better fishing grounds.

My hometown is very high in the level of sushi. It may sound natural for you reading up to here, but people are sometimes surprised because Asahikawa is located in the very middle of Hokkaido, surrounded by mountains, far away from the sea. However, it’s very natural if you think about it. Good seafood worth the transportation costs goes out to larger consuming areas, and it gathers to the central distribution base of Hokkaido, which is Asahikawa. If you want to eat delicious sushi, please come here to Asahikawa!