How Norway got Japan to eat raw salmon

A fish Japan cooked

Japan already had salmon. Its own wild salmon, mostly chum, was sold as 鮭 (shake) and eaten salted or grilled, not raw. Wild salmon can carry parasites. In a later survey, published in 2003, Tokyo’s public-health institute found Anisakis larvae in all 27 wild autumn chum salmon it tested, up to 161 in a single fish. A separate sample of 27 imported farmed fish, 8 of them Norwegian, had none.

Project Japan

In 1985 Norway’s fisheries minister Thor Listau took a delegation to Japan. Bjørn Eirik Olsen, who worked on the project from 1986 to 1990, says the Norwegian ambassador had his chef make sushi with Norwegian salmon, and the delegation was surprised the fish could be eaten raw.

Project Japan opened the next year under fisheries minister Bjarne Mørk Eidem. The goal was to double Norway’s fish exports to Japan in three years, with a budget of about NOK 30 million, and it ran until 1990 under project leader Richard Pedersen.

Olsen did the market research. His conclusions were to go after the expensive raw-fish market, which tuna owned, instead of the cheaper salmon fillet market; to call the product サーモン (sāmon) instead of 鮭, so it would not be confused with Pacific salmon; and to sell it on freshness, taste, texture and fat instead of colour and price.

Japanese wholesalers, importers and processors told him the Japanese don’t eat salmon raw. One early help was the TV “Iron Chef” Ishinabe, who started using Norwegian salmon raw as well as smoked. Even so, Olsen writes, after several years only a little salmon was being eaten raw.

The frozen salmon nobody wanted

The break came from a failure. In 1991 Norway’s fish farmers’ sales organisation, FOS, went bankrupt and left 30,000 t of frozen salmon in storage. Olsen and the embassy’s commercial officer, Niwa, signed a contract with the frozen-food company Nichirei for 6,000 t, and Nichirei sold all of it to be eaten raw. In Norway’s customs records, frozen whole salmon to Japan went from 738 t in 1991 to 3,260 t in 1992. In 1995, Olsen says, he saw salmon nigiri sold in plastic packs in Tokyo for the first time.

What the customs records show

Norway’s customs records have country detail from 1988. That year Japan took 2,911 t of salmon. It peaked at 41,233 t in 1999, 12.3% of everything Norway exported.

From whole fish to fillets

Fresh whole fish to Japan peaked at 26,757 t in 2001 and was 9,239 t in 2025. That looks like a decline, but much of it is a change in what Japan buys. Fillets overtook whole fish in 2020, and made up 61% of the 26,038 t Japan took in 2025. A fillet weighs much less than the fish it was cut from, so the same number of fish shows up as fewer tonnes. Japan’s share of Norway’s salmon exports did fall, to 1.9% in 2025, but mostly because Norway’s exports to everyone else grew.

Still number one

In the seafood company Umios’s 2026 survey of conveyor-belt sushi customers, 47.7% picked salmon as a favourite topping. It has been number one in every edition since the survey started in 2012.

Source

Statistics Norway, table 08801, Norway's exports by commodity number and country (1988–2025). Tonnes are product weight as declared at export. Every era’s commodity codes for Atlantic salmon are summed into one series per form (listed in the JSON). Fillets have no salmon-specific code before 1991. The 1985 figure is the Norwegian Seafood Council’s. Download the data (JSON).

History: Bjørn Eirik Olsen's 2015 message for the 30th anniversary of salmon sushi; the Norwegian Seafood Council; Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Public Health (2003); Umios conveyor-belt sushi survey (2026).

Norway → Japan, monthly · 日本語: ノルウェー産サーモン輸出価格 · Another story: the hidden legs