Ehōmaki Period COrigin theory CVerified

A thick roll for the night of Setsubun

Setsubun is the eve of spring in the traditional calendar and falls in early February. On that night, ehomaki is eaten facing the year's ehō, the direction held to bring good fortune: a thick sushi roll, left uncut and eaten whole, in silence. It is also called marukaburi-zushi, sushi bitten into whole. Fillings such as rolled omelet are laid on vinegared rice, and the whole is rolled up in a sheet of nori (dried seaweed) with a bamboo mat. Rice, nori and egg have all been used in Japanese kitchens for a long time.

Handbills from Osaka's sushi shops

The oldest written source in which the custom appears is a promotional handbill issued in 1932 by an association of Osaka sushi shops, said to be kept at a sushi restaurant in the Tenma district of Osaka. It reportedly set out the origin of the observance, how to eat the roll, and that year's lucky direction. In 1940 a support group of the Osaka sushi shops' association printed a similar handbill, which sushi shops handed out to their customers. The researcher Kutsuzawa Hiroyuki takes the view that the custom was practised in a very limited part of Osaka from at least the Taishō era (1912–1926) up to the war, and that sushi shops were already promoting it at the time on the claim that it was an old tradition.

Postwar promotion and the spread through Kansai

After the war, in 1949, the Osaka sushi shops' association is said to have decided to revive the custom, which had fallen out of use, as a sales promotion to rival the grilled eel eaten on the Day of the Ox in high summer. In the 1950s an association of Osaka nori wholesalers, formed after the war, joined in. Nori no rekishi (A History of Nori, 1970), which traces the story of the nori trade, records that the association promoted "eating the sushi roll whole" from the moment it was formed, with great success.

From the late 1970s, handbills printed by the nori association, handbills from the thick-omelet trade, sushi-roll speed-eating contests in Osaka's Dōtonbori district and supermarket advertising all came together, and the Setsubun sushi roll took root as a Setsubun observance in the Kansai region, the area around Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe. In January 1989, too, the Osaka nori wholesalers' association and others staged a promotion in Dōtonbori under the banner "Setsubun Day: lucky sushi rolls, eaten whole." The researcher Iwasaki Takehiko sees this promotion by trade bodies in Kansai as having laid the groundwork for the later spread across the country.

From convenience-store shelves to the whole country

By Seven-Eleven's own account, the start came in 1989, when the chain, drawing on accounts of the Kansai custom, started selling Setsubun rolls at some of its stores in Hiroshima Prefecture. The company widened sales to the regions west of Kansai in 1995 and to its stores nationwide in 1998, selling the roll under the name "Marukaburi-zushi Ehomaki." Other convenience-store chains followed, and by around 2000 it could be bought at any of them. One researcher considers that these nationwide sales and the name "ehomaki" go a long way toward explaining how a Setsubun food of Kansai came to be known as an observance throughout Japan.

As Setsubun approaches, the handbills of sushi shops and supermarkets come with an account of where ehomaki came from. The version seen most often says that merchants of Senba, the old commercial heart of Osaka, started it between the end of the Edo period and the beginning of the Meiji era to pray for thriving business; after the war, the nori wholesalers' association also promoted this as "a tradition handed down in Osaka's Senba." Other stories have been told as well. One says it began as an amusement of the wealthy patrons of the pleasure quarters. Another says it began at Denpō, in what is now Osaka's Konohana Ward and was once the village of Saru, where young men and boatmen gathered for a kō, a local devotional association, and ate their sushi rolls without cutting them. A third says that a warlord of the Warring States period ate a sushi roll whole on Setsubun, rode out to battle, and won.

The warlord story is one of the origin tales told by people connected with the nori wholesalers' association, and the warlord is said to have been Horio Yoshiharu. But the method of making sushi rolls is said to appear in writing for the first time in a cookbook of 1776, the Shinsen kondate buruishū, and there is no record of rolled sushi before then. It is hard to imagine sushi rolls in a military camp of the Warring States period, the age of civil war that ran through the sixteenth century. Later, sushi shops' handbills recast what the warlord ate as "something like a sushi roll."

The Senba merchants story, too, comes from the sushi shops' association's handbills and from trade promotion, and has nothing else to stand on. Kutsuzawa Hiroyuki, who has studied how ehomaki spread, writes that no source has so far been found showing that the observance existed in the Edo or Meiji periods, and the records that do survive all date from the Taishō era onward. The story of the gathering at Denpō is presented by Konohana Ward as part of the ward's history. The ward says that the exact date is not known, and goes no further than to note a saying that the gathering may have existed in the 1800s, during the Edo period. What the ward cites is a narrative, partly told through dialogue, on page 6 of the local-history study Denpō no kataribe (5) by Katsu Yasuo, and no record from that time is presented. The chronology from a local-history society that accompanies the ward's page does not mention the Denpō gathering either. The ward itself writes that the idea of the lucky direction does not appear in this tradition.

The pleasure-quarters story is the one that ties in with written records. Shinoda Osamu, known for his research on sushi, wrote down in his Sushi no hon (The Book of Sushi, 1970) the reply of an Osaka sushi-shop owner: the practice of eating sushi rolls at Setsubun already existed in the early Taishō years and was carried on mainly in the pleasure quarters. It fell just when the new season's pickles were ready, and a nori roll with those pickles at its center was eaten whole, uncut, facing the lucky direction. The 1932 handbill from the sushi shops' association is also said to state that the custom had long been prized in the geisha world, and there is a recollection of geisha in Hyōgo Prefecture eating sushi rolls whole at Setsubun around 1955.

Yet the shop owner who spoke of the early Taishō years and the 1932 handbill both came from the sushi trade, which was promoting the custom at the time. Of the owner's testimony, Kutsuzawa writes that the possibility that a "manipulation of tradition" had already taken place cannot be ruled out. The accounts that call it an amusement of wealthy patrons or an entertainment at banquets likewise remain hearsay, and no record unconnected with the promotion is known so far. The story that it began in the pleasure quarters, plausible as it may be, cannot be fully confirmed.

The name "ehomaki" raises a question of its own that has not been answered. Seven-Eleven describes its 1989 launch as the beginning, but does not say that it gave the roll that name. Kutsuzawa could not find the word "ehomaki" before the convenience store's product name, and surmises that the name was given when the product was developed. Yet no promotional material from 1989 has been put forward showing that the roll was sold under that name that year, and FamilyMart, for its part, says that its first was in 1983, when it sold Setsubun sushi rolls in Osaka and Hyōgo prefectures. Who gave the roll its name, and when, is still unsettled.

What researchers now agree on is this sequence: promotion by the sushi-shop and nori-wholesaler associations in the Shōwa era (1926–1989) spread Osaka's Setsubun sushi roll through Kansai, and the convenience stores' nationwide sales in the 1990s carried it to the rest of Japan. How widely the custom was practised in Osaka before the promotion began, though, is a question on which researchers withhold judgment. The promotion cannot be said to have created an entirely new observance from nothing, and where the first roll was eaten remains unknown.