Why you should experience Sushizanmai in Tokyo, Japan.
Sushizanmai is an exuberant sushi restaurant where Kabukicho's nocturnal appetite, entertainment culture, international crowds and refusal to observe conventional hours meet a company built around bluefin tuna.
Set along Shokuan-dori near Kuyakusho-dori and just steps from Kabukicho, Sushizanmai Higashi Shinjuku occupies the eastern edge of a district where dinner regularly extends past midnight and a serious plate of sushi can become the final act of the evening. Fish arrives daily from Toyosu, giving the restaurant a practical role in a neighborhood fueled by late shifts, long nights and meals taken far outside conventional dining hours. Tuna dominates the brand's character, yet the counter retains the accessibility of a neighborhood sushi shop through individual nigiri, sashimi and larger assortments. The result is a sushi restaurant where Kabukicho's appetite for eating deep into the night meets Kiyoshi Kimura's campaign to make high-quality tuna accessible beyond rarefied sushi counters.
What you should know about Sushizanmai.
Sushizanmai is best known for Kiyoshi Kimura founding its first restaurant in Tsukiji in April 2001 as Japan's first sushi restaurant operating 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, after an earlier career that took him from the Japan Air Self-Defense Force into the seafood trade and independent business in 1979. Kimura built the original operation around relentless freshness: fish reached Tsukiji in the morning, Haneda Airport supplied catches from Japanese ports later in the day and Narita Airport brought seafood from overseas at night, supporting six daily deliveries and ingredient replacement on four-hour cycles. Sales reached ¥10 billion within five years, and Kiyomura opened its Kiyomura Juku sushi-chef school in 2006 before expanding the restaurant group across Japan. Kimura turned New Year tuna auctions into another defining chapter, paying ¥155.4 million for a 222-kilogram bluefin at Tsukiji in 2013, ¥333.6 million for a 278-kilogram fish at Toyosu in 2019 and a new record ¥510.3 million for a 243-kilogram bluefin in January 2026.
Kimura's fixation on tuna reaches back to childhood, when his mother returned from a gathering with two pieces of tuna sashimi and divided them among herself and three children so the family could share a food then regarded as expensive. That memory later shaped his approach to the auction fish: spectacular acquisition prices generate headlines, but the tuna is served through Sushizanmai without transferring the auction premium directly to diners. Akami delivers the cleanest, leanest reading of bluefin before chutoro introduces greater marbling and otoro pushes toward a softer, richer concentration of fat. Nigiri makes those differences especially clear across successive pieces, giving a meal at Sushizanmai its strongest focus when several cuts of tuna are ordered together and allowed to show why one fish became inseparable from Kimura's company.
How to fold Sushizanmai into your trip.
Sushizanmai works as the late dinner anchor for an evening moving through samurai history, entertainment architecture and postwar drinking culture across Shinjuku before sushi closes the night.
Begin at Samurai Museum, whose displays of armor, helmets and weapons introduce the military culture that shaped centuries of Japanese rule before the surrounding streets shift decisively toward modern entertainment. Continue to Shinjuku Toho Building, opened in 2015 on the former Shinjuku Koma Theater site, where Hotel Gracery Shinjuku rises above a cinema complex crowned by the Godzilla Head installed 40 meters above Kabukicho. Conclude at Golden Gai, where six narrow alleys preserve hundreds of tiny bars within a district that developed from the postwar black-market and entertainment economy before becoming closely associated with writers, filmmakers, actors and artists. Samurai material culture, Godzilla-era entertainment and Golden Gai's postwar drinking history carry the evening across radically different chapters of Shinjuku before Sushizanmai supplies the final plate with tuna at the center.
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