I just watched it. I don’t think we should worry about spoilers, especially with non-fiction documentaries—there’s no twist ending.
Anyway, I thought it was a very nicely done documentary with many delicious images, avoided the obvious mistake of putting Jiro on a pedestal & ignoring his staff, and did a good job of highlighting the double-edged nature of being a shokunin (great term). I found very true a comment from The New Yorker:
Jiro’s most notable innovations are comically subtle. For instance, he cites as one of his breakthroughs the decision to massage the tako for an additional half an hour to soften the otherwise rubbery flesh, and to serve it warm. He also decided to cook the shrimp to order, rather than in a batch in the morning.
One does wind up feeling sorry for the kids—and while Jiro may be happy, are they? Why did he have kids if he wasn’t going to do a good job, one wonders, and was just a stranger? (He says he convinced them to not go to college (so they could work for him immediately!); one wonders how loud that conversation was...) I was shocked when he spoke of his wife in the present tense because we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her, and I had assumed she simply died a few years or decades back. I was strongly reminded of the passage about professional athletes from David Foster Wallace I quoted in my subcultures essay. Sometimes a sacrifice may just make one lesser.
Still, Jiro Dreams of Sushi provoked some interesting blog posts:
Robin Hanson takes the expected tack of defending Jiro as a proto-em. With Hanson, if a workaholic comes up, you can expect him to either say that as an em, he would have a life worth living; or you can expect him to say that we should praise him because he is producing so much value for other people and consuming so little himself (possibly with some half-baked evopsych theorizing that any criticism is due to the workaholic perhaps being a less valuable ally).
Personally, I found interesting someone’s observation that women appear only as consumers towards the end. And why wouldn’t they? Jiro is not a life one really envys—think of all the also-rans. Wouldn’t it be better to be an non-autistic women who can instead enjoy the finer things in life? Sort of like Greenspun’s defense of the gender gap in STEM: given the options available to smart young women, like being a very well paid child psychology, why should they go into the miserable grinding underpaid fields like science? Let the autism-spectrum nut nerds take the ‘rewards’ of being in STEM. Of course, this implies that as we see, men will take the very topmost positions in these sorts of underpaid fields (think the winner’s curse, but not for auctions), and if ems are winner-take-all economics, ems will almost 100% be male uploads...
Tyler Cowen focuses not on the economics of fishing which it touched upon, but rather why the labor system with regard to setting up your own sushi restaurant and being an apprentice is so messed up. Cowen does have the economist’s expected take on the conveyor sushi (which the movie clearly regards with some horror). At some points I did feel with the commentator:
Frankly, this seems like a triumph of marketing, in the way that sushi chefs have trained Japanese audiences to perceive such subtle quality differences in the slicing of raw fish.
It would not surprise me too much if Jiro’s restaurant had only a small edge over the competitors… When Jiro said that to surprise your customers you had have to a higher standard of taste than them, I wondered ‘but how could they then appreciate it? You just said it was beyond their standard of taste!’
Steve Sailer complains about the subtitles. I dunno, the subs in my pirated HD torrent seemed perfectly readable to me. Another example of life sucking for the good doobies, I suppose… He also reiterates his old quasi-conspiracy theory:
Now, it’s possible that Michelin is tossing out stars in Japan to pump up its brand in that market. Or, there is this theory that whenever you read about how the Japanese economy has been so horrible for the last 22 years, which is all the time, that’s what the Japanese want you to believe. Back in the 1980s, everybody believed that the Japanese were going to buy up the whole world, so they gave the Japanese a lot of grief, such as putting quotas on car imports, forcing them to open plants in America. But then their bubble burst in 1990, and now you never hear about the Japanese anymore, except about how tragic their economy is and they can only afford $300 sushi dinners.
Yeah, too bad about the massive underemployment etc. Life’s also pretty good for the elite in America too. (At least his commenters call him on it.)
Why would you expect Jiro to be a good father? That wasn’t what he was focusing on.
Of course it wasn’t, and that’s the problem. No one stole Jiro’s semen and presented him a year later with a fait accompli of a bunch of babies: he chose to have kids, knowing that he would deliberately spend little time with them until they became useful to his monomania. They are means for him—towards cheap family labor (he thinks he is generous in letting them go to high school!), and then the restaurant succession. Yes, ignoring them may have enabled him to make slightly better sushi than everyone else—but is this something to laud? That’s the question here about Jiro: was mutilating his life and family worth it?
I’m not sure I can answer ‘yes’. It’s just sushi. (And before you shoot back ‘well, he certainly considers it worth it’, remember that a heroin addict or a wirehead could say as much.)
It would not surprise me too much if Jiro’s restaurant had only a small edge over the competitors…
While I can’t attest to the quality of Jiro’s sushi, the quality of the sushi served by a sushi bar at Tsukiji market (you can see the front left facade of the restaurant in the scene where Jiro’s son is departing from the market, and the camera is behind him, leaving only his shaded back visible—I can’t recall the name) was at least two orders of magnitude* better than any other sushi I have ever had; I have consumed much sushi.
*An order of magnitude here being three octaves of “Mmm!”
I just watched it. I don’t think we should worry about spoilers, especially with non-fiction documentaries—there’s no twist ending.
Anyway, I thought it was a very nicely done documentary with many delicious images, avoided the obvious mistake of putting Jiro on a pedestal & ignoring his staff, and did a good job of highlighting the double-edged nature of being a shokunin (great term). I found very true a comment from The New Yorker:
One does wind up feeling sorry for the kids—and while Jiro may be happy, are they? Why did he have kids if he wasn’t going to do a good job, one wonders, and was just a stranger? (He says he convinced them to not go to college (so they could work for him immediately!); one wonders how loud that conversation was...) I was shocked when he spoke of his wife in the present tense because we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of her, and I had assumed she simply died a few years or decades back. I was strongly reminded of the passage about professional athletes from David Foster Wallace I quoted in my subcultures essay. Sometimes a sacrifice may just make one lesser.
Still, Jiro Dreams of Sushi provoked some interesting blog posts:
Robin Hanson takes the expected tack of defending Jiro as a proto-em. With Hanson, if a workaholic comes up, you can expect him to either say that as an em, he would have a life worth living; or you can expect him to say that we should praise him because he is producing so much value for other people and consuming so little himself (possibly with some half-baked evopsych theorizing that any criticism is due to the workaholic perhaps being a less valuable ally).
Personally, I found interesting someone’s observation that women appear only as consumers towards the end. And why wouldn’t they? Jiro is not a life one really envys—think of all the also-rans. Wouldn’t it be better to be an non-autistic women who can instead enjoy the finer things in life? Sort of like Greenspun’s defense of the gender gap in STEM: given the options available to smart young women, like being a very well paid child psychology, why should they go into the miserable grinding underpaid fields like science? Let the autism-spectrum nut nerds take the ‘rewards’ of being in STEM. Of course, this implies that as we see, men will take the very topmost positions in these sorts of underpaid fields (think the winner’s curse, but not for auctions), and if ems are winner-take-all economics, ems will almost 100% be male uploads...
Tyler Cowen focuses not on the economics of fishing which it touched upon, but rather why the labor system with regard to setting up your own sushi restaurant and being an apprentice is so messed up. Cowen does have the economist’s expected take on the conveyor sushi (which the movie clearly regards with some horror). At some points I did feel with the commentator:
It would not surprise me too much if Jiro’s restaurant had only a small edge over the competitors… When Jiro said that to surprise your customers you had have to a higher standard of taste than them, I wondered ‘but how could they then appreciate it? You just said it was beyond their standard of taste!’
Steve Sailer complains about the subtitles. I dunno, the subs in my pirated HD torrent seemed perfectly readable to me. Another example of life sucking for the good doobies, I suppose… He also reiterates his old quasi-conspiracy theory:
Yeah, too bad about the massive underemployment etc. Life’s also pretty good for the elite in America too. (At least his commenters call him on it.)
iSugoi did a normal review.
Why would you expect Jiro to be a good father? That wasn’t what he was focusing on.
If everyone is an em, who would appreciate the em’s work?
I saw the movie in a theater, and had trouble with the subtitles. Maybe they were improved for the DVD.
Of course it wasn’t, and that’s the problem. No one stole Jiro’s semen and presented him a year later with a fait accompli of a bunch of babies: he chose to have kids, knowing that he would deliberately spend little time with them until they became useful to his monomania. They are means for him—towards cheap family labor (he thinks he is generous in letting them go to high school!), and then the restaurant succession. Yes, ignoring them may have enabled him to make slightly better sushi than everyone else—but is this something to laud? That’s the question here about Jiro: was mutilating his life and family worth it?
I’m not sure I can answer ‘yes’. It’s just sushi. (And before you shoot back ‘well, he certainly considers it worth it’, remember that a heroin addict or a wirehead could say as much.)
While I can’t attest to the quality of Jiro’s sushi, the quality of the sushi served by a sushi bar at Tsukiji market (you can see the front left facade of the restaurant in the scene where Jiro’s son is departing from the market, and the camera is behind him, leaving only his shaded back visible—I can’t recall the name) was at least two orders of magnitude* better than any other sushi I have ever had; I have consumed much sushi.
*An order of magnitude here being three octaves of “Mmm!”