Sushi (寿司, 寿し, 鮨, or すし sushi). Sushi means "vinegar-y" in old Japanese, back when -i adjectives used to end in -shi instead. Note that in Japanese, sushi doesn't refer to raw fish, just vinegared rice. It was invented in the Edo period as a way of preserving rice. Pretty soon, people started slapping pieces of fish on top of the vinegared rice, and a taste sensation swept the nation. Nowadays, most sushi can be classified into a number of categories. The two big ones are maki (巻き), sushi rice wrapped in seaweed, and nigiri (握り), hand made sushi in which a piece of fish is stuck to the top of a bit of rice by a dab of wasabi.

Slabs of raw fish by themselves are known as sashimi? in Japanese and traditionally eaten with soy sauce and wasabi.

Historically, sushi should have been written with the character 酸い meaning acidic, but that doesn't look very appetizing, so the Japanese just matched up some characters with nicer meanings and similar sounds to use instead (a process called ateji?).

Toyama Prefecture is known for masu-zushi, trout sushi. Trust me, it's better than it sounds! All the big train stations sell orange boxes of it for ¥1,000, so try it sometime. Also, if you visit Japanese people outside the Ken, they'll be delighted to receive some trout sushi as omiyage?.