When someone invites you out to eat sushi, the standard western rules of eating properly apply. Don’t chew with your mouth open, don’t speak with your mouth full, get your elbows off the table, don’t stab your guests with a shiv fashioned out of a chopstick… you know the drill.

But what about when you find yourself face to face with a real honest to goodness Japanese companion? What are the rules then?

Well, they’re not overly complex. You don’t have to learn any elaborate Japanese tea ceremonies, you don’t have to wear geisha headgear, and you don’t have to bow before you sit (although we personally feel it’s a nice touch).

NO TOES!
The first rule is to keep your shoes on. Yes, we know that Japanese restaurants often ask you to leave your shoes at the door, but your average American sushi bar isn’t a Nagoya gourmet house; it’s a store-front that sells California Rolls by the dozen – clothe yourself accordingly.

If your sushi restaurant is a little more high-falutin’, the waitress will bring you a hot towel to wash your hands. Many Americans use these to wipe their faces. This is silliness. The idea of the hot towel is that you wipe your hands with it, so you can pick up your sushi with fingers that don’t look like tentacles on the Monster From The Bottom Of The Ocean (TM).

THE MYSTERY OF THE PINK AND THE GREEN
Often, you’ll hear American sushi rookies saying, "What’s this pink and green stuff they gave me?"

The pink stuff (which looks like Lox) is actually pickled ginger. The reason you get that is so you have something to eat between dishes, to cleanse your palate. Most Americans think this is either salmon, or they don’t know what the hell it is, and they just leave it be.

The green stuff is Wasabi – don’t eat it straight. It’s really freakin’ hot.

What you want to do is take a tiny bit of it on your chopstick, put it in the little sauce plate that comes with your meal, drop it in there and pour soy sauce into it. Then mix the two ingredients with your chopstick until the wasabi has all but dissolved (or at least broken into tiny bits that won’t kill you when consumed). Once you’ve done that, dip your sushi rolls into it for a jolt of zowie-spicy flavor.

Understand, however, that it’s just not done to mix your wasabi with soy sauce when you’re in a five-star Japanese restaurant, or the home of the kind of person who spends $400 on sushi plates. If you find yourself in that kind of scene, lose the shoes, use the wasabi straight, and don’t let the flames in your mouth consume you.

Or be indignant in your whorish back alley ways and tell everyone around you to ‘lighten up’. That usually goes down very well.

FORK YOU.
In America, you’ll often be presented with chopsticks to use when eating your sushi. That’s all well and good, but you should realize that in Japan you’re going to be using your hands, Sparky. Sushi is finger food, so the chopsticks aren’t needed, but when in America, what the hell – chopstick away.

Heck, some people even plump for a good ol’ American fork (as seen to the left). Of course, those people eat steak with their hands, so there’s just no reason to the world, at all, as best as we can see.

Don’t bite into your sushi roll. Eat it. The whole damn thing. Get ‘er in there. Biting a little off and putting it back on your plate is something akin to walking up to your Japanese host and smacking him in the face with a two-by-four. A flaming two-by-four, at that.

If you can’t eat an entire piece of sushi roll, you just ain’t trying. Or you have a really tiny mouth, and should probably be restricting yourself to smaller objects, like peas and corn. And maybe kelp.

CALIFORNIA WHAT?!
The purists will say that you shouldn’t dip the rice part of your sushi slice into soy sauce, as it becomes too moist and falls apart.

This, of course, is nonsense. As long as you’re not leaving the sushi roll in soy sauce overnight to marinate, and are instead just dipping it long enough to get a little flavor on it, then your slice should stay intact at least long enough to get mawed by your humongous choppers.

In fact, if any sushi-head should mock you for rice-dipping, you should not only dip your rice in the soy, but squish it down into the soy sauce like you’re trying to sponge-dry the sauce dish. Then you should rip it up towards your mouth, hold it there for a second or two, and say the words, "Heathen represent," before snarfing the whole damn thing. That’ll show ‘em.

MYSTERY MEAT
Oh. Lastly, when you learn that the mystery ingredient in that sushi dish you just finished, and really enjoyed, was actually eel… don’t yell "EEEEEW! EEEL?!" at the top of your voice in the middle of the restaurant.

We know it’s gross, they know it’s gross… It’s meat. Just shut up and eat it already.