Why It’s the Perfect Time to Watch (or Rewatch) Jiro Dreams of Sushi on Netflix

It's the perfect antidote to our unfocused age.

There’s a good chance you opened this article in a browser with a dozen other tabs. Maybe your TV is on or a podcast is playing. Your phone is pinging with notifications from texts, Twitter, and Facebook. We live in an age when we have everything... except focus. This is why it’s a good time to close your tabs, turn off your notifications, and watch—or likely rewatch—Jiro Dreams of Sushi.

If you haven’t seen it, Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a 2011 documentary about an acclaimed sushi chef who operates out of a tiny restaurant in a Tokyo subway. As a food documentary, it is a beautifully made film with all the sushi “food porn” shots you need to get your mouth watering. (Indeed, the film was so successful on that front that Netflix hired director David Gelb to create the food-as-high-art TV show Chef’s Table.) Jiro also has an appropriately minimalist-but-mesmerizing soundtrack from Philip Glass.

A Perfect Party Cocktail

But the real power of the film is the work ethic of the titular dreaming chef: Jiro Ono is an 85 year old man whose entirely life is devoted to making sushi. And that’s basically it. Jiro has been making the same sushi in more or less the same way for decades and decades. Jiro isn’t an viosinary chef creating previously untasted dishes, nor a modernist mad scientist cook turning his kitchen into a laboratory. Instead, he practices the same techniques again and again. But this obsessive dedication has led him to closer to perfecting it, making him perhaps the most acclaimed sushi chef in the world and the oldest chef to earn Michelin stars. “I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit,” Jiro explains. “I'll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is.”

It’s quite a different message than we normally get in America. In our Silicon Valley obsessed culture, the hallmark of genius seems to be “disrupting” industries and having lots of big ideas that may never even happen. Think of Elon Musk, who every other week seems to declare a new venture: Solar batteries? Space flights? Hyperloop train? Sure thing! Jiro Ono gives us the polar opposite work ethic. Repetition and refinement are the keys to his success, and you can see it in his hands as molds sushi with the skill of a classical guitarist. Does this mean Jiro never changes his craft? No, at one point he admits that he changed his technique for making octopus. He used to massage it for 30 minutes. Now he does 40. At one point, Jiro gives his advice on his son, who has been conscripted—it is a bit hard to tell how willingly—into the same sushi-making existence: “He should just keep doing the same thing for the rest of his life.”

Most likely,

Jiro Dreams of Sushi won’t make you drop everything in your life and focus entirely on your perfecting one skill. And maybe it shouldn’t. Jiro’s life doesn’t necessarily sound the most fulfilling. “He repeats the same routine everyday,” a Japanese restaurant critic says, noting that “he has said he dislikes holidays” because it doesn’t let him work. Still, Jiro Dreams of Sushi is a good reminder that perfection doesn’t merely happen. It is borne out of blood and sweat and constant practice. If you find something you love in life as much as Jiro loves making sushi, you have to just work at it “over and over, improving bit by bit.”

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