Jiro Dreams of Sushi (2011) Review

"When you first sit down at Jiro's, they give you a hand-squeezed hot towel. An apprentice must first be able to properly hand-squeeze a towel. At first, the towels are so hot they burn the apprentice's hands. It's very painful training, which is very Japanese. Until you can adequately squeeze a towel, they won't let you touch the fish. Then you can learn to cut and prepare the fish. After about ten years, they let you cook the eggs."

To read the Yelp reviews of Jiro Ono's sushi restaurant, is to find primarily a civil war. Fought between those heirs to the documentary film's fawning food critic and chief hype-man Masuhiro Yamamoto, who should really be wearing one of the restaurant's bright red kitchen timers on a thick gold chain around his neck, and people who seem, to a person, very concerned about whether or not they were allowed to take a cell phone photo with the master-chef . A third, smaller, splinter group of reviewers rules the overly-vinegared sushi rice to be counter-revolutionary.

The film, through Jiro Ono, preaches routine, dedication, simplicity, quality, patience, and craft. These are the same set of qualities that you could pick up from any self-help guru, or life-coach, hawking a book called 'F*ck Fun: How to let go and make boredom your bitch" or a $1,200 video course on how to build a fulfilled life. But as received wisdom goes, from an 85 year old who seems to have few regrets with how his working life has gone, the message carries more weight.

There is a clear dichotomy drawn between Jiro's father, an unhappy drunk, who abandoned his son amid a failed business, and Jiro whose business succeeded wildly, but at the expense of being able to be at home for his own son's childhoods. Whereas Jiro's father was dead by the time he would have graduated high school, Jiro dragoons his two sons at the same age into working at his restaurant instead of going to college, setting them both on the path of the rest of their lives in the sushi business, his business.

Now, whether his wife (who is never seen nor indeed mentioned) or his two sons (who take the attitude of "I'm glad my dad pushed me like that, even if I didn't like it at the time" that is very difficult to pin down as either mature reflection or Stockholm Syndrome) are as happy as the man in charge is mostly left for the audience to speculate.

But Jiro himself really does seem happy and humble. His dedication to his work did not bring his life balance, but it brought him an enviable satisfaction in his work life that doesn't feel performative, and a level of outside recognition (3 Michelin stars) that seems to imply he has truly figured something out, about both making sushi and himself.