amazon instant video rental "Jiro Dreams of Sushi" $0.99

I wrote "robbed him and his children of any time and relationship while they were growing up." I don't know, but maybe it was the part where Jiro mentions coming home and his son asks "mommy who is that strange man that sleeps in our house." There is nothing mutually exclusive between having abandoning your wife and kids while your kids are growing up and having your kids try desperately to get your attention by following in your footsteps and trying to live up to your expectations.

This is a feature film length infomercial about some seriously over-hyped fish.

This is free on Netflix... Also, painfully boring movie. It just keeps bragging about this old Japanese chef who they film looking solemnly on his customers as they eat his over priced sushi. This is a feature film length infomercial about some seriously over-hyped fish.

I found the whole "pursuit of excellence" to be unconvincing and embarrassingly disingenuous. This is a story about a businessman selling expensive fish. My interpretation is that he was on a life-long pursuit of bamboozling people into believing he is some sort of Sushi god. I found it to be pretty pathetic, and often monotonous in it's repetition of the same old praise with no dissenting opinions.


The majority of people won't be able to tell the difference between $6 sushi and Jiro's sushi. However, if someone tells them that Jiro is a genius, has dedicated his life to making sushi, they will gladly pay several times that and actually tear up as they're eating it because it's "so good". It's marketing, and Jiro has built up a reputation that sells sushi. It's not the sushi that has built up his reputation. Jiro is a marketing genius, he was able to sell dedication to craft so effectively as to make the quality of his product irrelevant. There's no doubt Jiro is a good sushi chef. But Sushi God? Please...

I bet if $6 fish was served at Jiro's, someone would declare it the best in the world. After all, Jiro the sushi God said it's good. So it must be good.

Funny enough, the documentary glosses over the fact that his son is now solely managing his father's restaurant. When the Michelin star people came over, his son was the one who prepared the fish. So the Michelin people really tasted sushi prepared by Jiro's son. They thought they were eating the "Sushi God's" food, but in reality they were eating his son's food. They could not tell the difference, so they awarded Jiro the 3 Michelin stars. At some point the subtleties of sushi become so fine as to be indistinguishable, in such cases it all comes down marketing.

Even the most discriminating palates cannot discriminate between sushi prepared correctly from fresh fish by different, half-way decent sushi chefs.

People really need to be more resilient to marketing...

edit: I should disclaim my comment by saying that I have the utmost respect for Japanese culture and the Japanese people in general. I have been on a Japan cinema binge on Netflix, which is why I watched this doc. Even though I understand Jiro is regarded as a "Japanese national treasure", my criticism of this doc should not be interpreted as an attack on Japanese people/culture.

This is probably not a very interesting movie for AMERICAN centric mind.