
It’s not every day you see a literal kaiten sushi.
Restaurants that serve sushi to customers via a conveyor belt go by many names in the West–in some places they’re known as “sushi trains“, while other places call them “conveyor belt sushi restaurants” and others know them as “rotating sushi restaurants“. Here in Japan, though, they go by one name: kaitenzushi.
“Kaiten” literally means “rotation“, and “zushi” is “sushi” with a hardened consonant, a grammatical rule that applies when “sushi” is combined with a prefix. This means “kaitenzushi” literally translates to “rotation sushi“, which is a pretty descriptive title, given that the conveyor belt rotates past diners around the restaurant.
However, when you think about it, “kaitenzushi” could also be applied to the sushi itself, if it were actually rotating on the rotating conveyor belt, and that’s the observation people made on the Internet when this video went viral recently.
回転寿司で回転する鉄火巻。
— 荷方邦夫 (@nikata920) January 11, 2021
#お前よくぞそんなもん撮ってたな選手権 pic.twitter.com/RFHpKqTT9E
As the clip above shows, a rogue sushi appears to have escaped from its dish and attempted to live out its dreams of being a literal sushi roll, rotating and rolling in a scene laden with puns that commenters were quick to pick up on.
“The true meaning of rotation sushi!”
“A tuna roll that rolls!”
“I feel like it has a cheeky personality.”
“This made me lol, it’s like a surrealist film!”
“Revolving while revolving…max kaitenzushi!”
Surprisingly, this wasn’t the first rolling tuna roll to roll by diners, as other people on Twitter were quick to share their own experiences with rogue sushi rotating on the rotating conveyor belt at the sushi train. People online weren’t sure why or how these morsels of sushi escaped, but everyone is hoping they were just random incidents of a diner, perhaps a child, tilting the dish by accident when picking their selection up from the belt.
Because, as we all know, purposefully wasting food in Japan is a big no-no, even if you’re trying to curb your calories at a sushi restaurant.
Source: Twitter/@nikata920
Featured image: Pakutaso
Insert image: Twitter/@nikata920
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