Body Sushi

Watch where you put the wasabi.

"Before becoming a living sushi platter, the person (usually a woman) is trained to lie down for hours without moving. She or he must also be able to withstand the prolonged exposure to the cold food. Before service, the individual is supposed to have taken a bath using a special fragrance-free soap and then finished off with a splash of cold water to cool the body down somewhat for the sushi."

— Jack Herbert, Japan for the Uninvited

Body Sushi is the English term for nyotaimori or nantaimori. Nyotaimori or "female body presentation" comes from Japan and is the act of eating sushi off the body of a nude woman. The male version, nantaimori, does exist but it's not as common.

As one might guess, this is often a form of Fanservice. Expect it in works that want to convey a sense of erotic mystery concerning Japan. Yakuza are often involved as well. It should be noted, however, that the practice is not nearly as mainstream in Japanese culture as some may think. Plus, as any chef can tell you, it's hardly hygienic.

Not to be confused with Food Porn. See also Improvised Clothes and the (relatively) modest Edible Theme Clothing. May result in Erotic Eating in some scenarios, especially when this happens as a form of seduction.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Shiro foams at the mouth in disgust in Adekan when he is offered Body Sushi off a drag queen.
• Booty Royale: Never Go Down Without a Fight!: Played for laughs in chapter 15, the start of the Fist of the Tokyo She-Beast arc. A slightly tipsy Goujima Sara gets grumpy with Misora at the launch party and challenges her to a fight; loser has to be a nude sushi platter. Misora understandably refuses, Sara attacks her anyway and is taken down in nothing flat, and pays up.
• In the fourth episode of Hen Zemi, Mizukoshi acts as a nyotaimori gathering where it shows various food on her body.
• An episode of Higurashi: When They Cry Kira has a fruit and yogurt variation of this trope in a fantasy sequence.
• Hybrid × Heart Magias Academy Ataraxia: At one point, Kizuna's harem attempts to seduce him by wheeling in Silvia and Ragrus naked and covered with fruit and candy, saying they learned about nyotaimori from the Internet. After he has eaten his fill, Yurishia and Landred join in by covering their enormous boobs with food, but he complains that he's already full.
• In Ino-Head Gargoyle, Okita and Saejima partake in this at a restaurant in Nagoya.
• In the fourth episode of Interspecies Reviewers, a Salamander fire spirit girl is shown running a racier version of this, where she uses her body heat to cook food while enhancing the flavor with her mana, and also permits her customers to get handsy with her if they can take the heat. She even delights in it. She also offers "additional" services, but only someone fire-resistant (like Crim) can enjoy the experience without being cooked alive.
• In Kanokon, Chizuru gets into a body-sized sushi boat naked in an attempt to hit on Kouta.
• In Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt, after Panty's debut film ruins her reputation, she laments over the fact that there will be "no more naked men covered in sushi!"
• The hentai Ryokan Shirasagi (English: Swallowtail Inn) takes place in a restaurant that specializes in this.
• Seven Mortal Sins: In Episode 7, when Beelzebub, the Demon of Gluttony, holds a feast, there are two naked women covered with food on the table.
• Momoko in the manga version of Sumomo Mo Momo Mo at one point manages to prepare herself in this style and put herself under a creche for Koushi. Unfortunately for her and her desire to seduce him, he slams the creche back down over her immediately.

Comic Books

• Hawkeye: In Hawkeye (2012) #20, Kate Bishop goes undercover as a body-sushi girl in order to get inside Madame Masque's headquarters.

Fan Works

• In Nepetaquest 2011, Zander says it's in his job description (the eating part, not the lying down part).

Films — Live-Action

• The J-horror comedy Big Tits Zombie has two scenes with this act, involving drunk yakuza members. The first is the more traditional version while the second involves zombies eating a nude woman in a manner that reflects the previous scene.
• Brüno:
  • In the scene where Brüno is interviewing Paula Abdul. He has sushi on top of a naked fat, hairy Mexican wheeled into the room. Paula Abdul leaves, clearly disgusted.
  • On the other hand, La Toya Jackson actually takes a bite from the same human sushi tray in another interview scene with Brüno, even quipping jokes about her brother Michael Jackson. This scene was deleted in the final cut, as Michael had died right before the film's release.
• The film version of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum has a version of this happening in Ancient Rome (with Roman food, not sushi) as part of the "sit-down orgy for fourteen" that Miles Gloriosus arranges while awaiting his purchased bride.
• The Spanish movie Map Of The Sounds Of Tokyo depicts nyotaimori in one scene.
• Strangely enough, the 1972 film Necromancy features a Western Pagan version of this. Orson Welles runs a coven of witches and in one scene, a group of witches can be seen eating fruit off a naked woman in this manner.
• Rising Sun has a scene in which a yakuza performs this moments before Sean Connery's and Wesley Snipes's characters bust him.
• In the black comedy The Ro©k Con Artists, the crime boss Sallinger antagonist invites his partners to a private dinner which features this style of food presentation.
• The Sex and the City movie has a scene in which Samantha does this as a Valentine's Day present for her lover.
• The Brandon Lee and Dolph Lundgren film Showdown in Little Tokyo depicts a private yakuza party, complete with Nyotaimori. Murata promises Kenner that they'll do the same after they get revenge for his parents.
• Sushi Girl: the title character in the 2012 Mark Hamill film is a body sushi girl who serves at a reunion of thieves. She becomes a Chekhov's Gunman in the end.
• Happens in Tampopo between a yakuza and his wife.
• Usurpers of Emperor's Power has a pool scene where the villain, Prince Jin, uses a naked concubine as a fruit plate and eats off her. He's naked himself, for good measure.
• War (2007) with Jason Statham and Jet Li also has a body sushi scene involving, what else, gangsters.

Live-Action TV

• 30 Rock:
  • Tracy holds a business function and has sushi served on Kenneth - the wasabi is kept in his mouth.
  • In season 6, episode 16, Tracy is trying to de-geek his son in a montage - one of the activities is eating french fries, burgers, and chicken nuggets off of a naked woman in this manner.
• Arrow: Tommy Merlyn has a liking for this trope, but it's just done as a couple of throwaway lines to establish him as a playboy billionaire.
  Tommy: Do you like sushi? Have you ever had anyone eat some off of you? I promise not to use chopsticks.
  Laurel: [Walk-In Chime-In] Are you still using that line? [woman pulls a face and vanishes] Well, it looks like I scared her off.
  Tommy: Oh, that's all right — she's vegan, anyway.
• An episode of Come Dine With Me, a host serves a starter of sushi to his guests in the Nantaimori fashion.
• CSI: NY: A Victim of the Week in "Grand Master" turns out to have been poisoned at one of these. The perpetrator was a young woman serving as a table; she had previously been a personal assistant to the victim, who fired her for refusing her sexual advances and then used her connections to ensure that the young woman couldn't find work anywhere else in their industry. When the victim learned that her former PA was working at the sushi restaurant, she began to specifically request her and continued to sexually harass her. Unable to refuse the customer out of fear of being fired, the former PA laced her toenail polish with blowfish venom; a chip of the nail polish was found in the victim's mouth and determined to be the cause of death.
• It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: After Frank gets his job back as an executive at Atwater Capital in the "Frank's Back in Business" episode, he meets some potential Japanese investors over a nyotaimori meal.
  Frank: I want this sushi dinner to be the tits!
  Charlie: Okay, so you want it to be really expensive.
  Frank: No! No! I mean I want to eat it off some Jap broad's tits!
• In Kenny vs. Spenny, Spenny's humiliation for losing a competition involves him having to eat sushi off of Kenny's naked, hairy body.
• The title character in Mandy gets a job doing this. She doesn't even last a whole meal before getting fired for talking to the diners... and smoking.
• In the second season of the US version of MasterChef, a contestant attempts to impress the judges by serving the nyotaimori variety of this in the auditions. It didn't work.
• An episode of Pit Boss had the crew receiving a job from a client that wanted three little people to do this.
• In Regency House Pary One of the young ladies does this in homage to Lady Caroline Lamb.
• The Surreal Life:
  • It was a reality show featuring has-been celebrities living together. One episode showed Verne Troyer eating sushi off the naked body of a celebrity from America's Next Top Model. She was not happy when he decided to cop a feel.
  • The last season turned the series into a reality gameshow with many celebs returning, including Troyer. They had the cast sit down with both a man and woman nantaimori/nyotaimori respectively. Learning his lesson from the previous episode, Troyer decided not to get frisky.
• In Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, a Cloudcuckoolander offered to set up dinner while Jackie and Kimmy talked. Moments later, they realize she had laid herself up in this method. Later, she complains she received a rash from it.

Music

• The video for Rammstein's "Deutschland" has a variation, where the band members are eating food from Germania's body.

Video Games

• A variant appears in the (very NSFW and obviously, non-canon) Death Note Yaoi game Bound Prince. Instead of sushi, little cakes are used.
• Inverted in League of Legends by Nami in the recall animation for her SKT T1 skin. Instead of laying sushi on her body, she summons up a bed of sushi rice on a serving tray and, being a mermaid, lays herself on it to become sushi. Then she takes selfies of herself from a number of angles using her staff like a selfie stick, until a giant pair of chopsticks picks her up and carries her off.
• Watch_Dogs: Just in the trailer, but the scene is supposed to represent the vulgarity of the building it appears in. Then it gets worse.

Visual Novels

• Lovelink: Jade/Eveline mentions that she livestreamed herself with sushi on her body for her cam girl job in the past.

Web Comics

• In Black Adventures:
  Pod: EATING OFF OUR BODIES IS RECOMMENDED!
• Karin-dou 4koma: Tamaryu draws her "personalized winning ticket" during the school lunch lottery and is baffled to find this specified. Ran and Shizuki are delighted and take her to an unused classroom, but all three are caught and punished.
• Played for laughs in Ménage à 3: in one omake Zii and Didi are eating sushi on a nude girl, when suddenly Zii realize that something's wrong... the girl they're eating on is not Japanese but Korean!
• Played for Hypocritical Humor in the second strip of Two Guys and Guy: The trio eats such a meal while discussing that other people are perverts with weird fetishes.

Web Videos

• The Try Guys from BuzzFeed did this once as a prank. Various people were unimpressed, partially because they'd been told lunch would be provided and they had to wait a long time for it, and also because the part about it being served on their coworkers' naked bodies was conveniently left out.

Western Animation

• Big Mouth: In "Best Friends Make the Best Lovers," DeVon's fantasy of a perfect guys' night out includes eating sushi off a naked woman, until a giant piece of steak brushes off sushi as being for "vegetarian cucks."
• Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix: Episode 3 ends with Rayman eating sushi off a cow girl prostitute's ass. It became very popular for obvious reasons.
• In Clerks: The Animated Series, Randall recounts being married to a Japanese businessman, who had him do this.
• Harley Quinn (2019); the Joker mentions he and Harley did this once with Commissioner Gordon as the platter. The Joker laughs that he spent a week picking hair out of his teeth.
• Frisky Dingo had an episode in which the Big Bad eats sushi this way while interrogating the protagonists.

Real Life

• Western counterparts to this trope include serving food from trays carried on little people's heads (a practice which appeared in The Three Musketeers, and which Queen reportedly did with trays of cocaine at a party) and Lady Caroline Lamb's alleged stunt of emerging naked from an enormous soup tureen at a banquet.
• Certain high-end strip clubs and sushi restaurants in North America are known to arrange this. Bring your wallet. Among those places are Geisha House in Las Vegas.
• South African entrepreneur Kenny Kunene once held a birthday party that featured nyotaimori, which caused a great deal of controversy.
• Foodplay in general, which is what it sounds like. Popular choices in Western culture are sweet, like for example doing chocolate or cream, in particular someone offering their significant other a chance to enjoy licking them clean of the topping of choice.

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