Shokunin

To this day, I maintain that if I had to choose only one kind of cuisine to eat every day for the rest of my life, it would have to be Japanese. Sushi would be the strongest factor in that choice, but Japanese — I could eat it every day.

Last evening, Jen and I sat down excitedly to take in a screening of Jiro Dreams of Sushi. It chronicles the life, but more importantly, the dedication, discipline and devotion to craft of 3-star Michelin sushi chef, Jiro Ono.

I won’t delve into the movie too much aside to say that it made my head spin in many ways and made me reconsider everything. It moved me, in an age where we stay at jobs no longer than our attention-deficient hearts and minds desire to.

There’s a pride and stubbornness in Jiro’s singleminded zeal for perfection — that every time he makes sushi, he wants to make it better than the last time, even if it’s such an incredibly minute and incremental kind of better.

The film reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, where he states the “10,000-Hour rule”, whereby to be successful in anything, one has to dedicate 10,000 hours to that task.

Jiro’s shokunin is just that — a person who embodies the artisan spirit of the relentless pursuit of perfection through his craft. It is the craftsman’s spirit.

It makes me consider the fact that despite my own many desires to be well-rounded and adaptable, that there’s an absolute beauty in doing one thing so magnificently well.

Thank you, Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

Related & tangential

1. Shokunin kishitsu, the craftman’s spirit
2. 10,000 hours

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