Rei Masuda

The Path

Sushi work is often formed in the hours between service, and Rei Masuda’s training follows that slower, more exact route: student labor, counter work, fish handling, apprenticeship, repetition. While studying at Kitakyushu Academy For Cooks, he began as a part-time worker at Tenzushi in Kokura City, Fukuoka, where the pace of a working kitchen would have demanded timing before technique could settle into place. He then moved to Mansou in Kokura as an employee, a step that extended the same discipline across another kitchen and another set of daily standards. Work in a fish store added the raw side of the trade, where freshness and handling are not abstract ideas but the basis of the craft itself. The longest period came at Sukiyabashi Jiro in Tokyo, where Rei Masuda spent nine years as an apprentice under Jiro-san. That kind of apprenticeship is built on endurance as much as instruction, and it tends to leave a chef with a fixed sense of standard: posture, timing, restraint, and the refusal to treat any repetition as casual. Since 2015, Rei Masuda has been chef of Sushi Masuda, and since 2016, chef of Sushi Wakon. Those appointments mark the point at which a long training sequence became an established practice across two kitchens, with his name attached to both as the measure of the work inside them.

The Work Today

The working logic behind Rei Masuda’s sushi is plain enough: technique matters, but technique without conduct is incomplete. His background points to a chef who treats handling, shaping, and judgment as parts of the same discipline, from the fish itself to the steadiness required at the counter. At Sushi Masuda since 2015 and Sushi Wakon since 2016, he stands in the position that years of repetition are meant to produce: not speed for its own sake, but control, consistency, and attention to what the work asks for each day. His comments on apprenticeship make that standard explicit. Progress at the counter is not only a matter of skill accumulation; it also depends on whether the cook understands responsibility toward the craft. In that sense, the sushi counter becomes a place where technique and awareness have to hold together.

In Their Words “Many of my new apprentices are serious in their approach to sushi, but some lack an essential element of concern for their work and their actions.” The point here is not enthusiasm, but accountability. Rei Masuda separates seriousness from concern, treating concern as the part of the work that keeps technique from becoming mechanical. It is a useful distinction for any trade built on repetition. “I worked for Jiro-san for nine years.” Nine years under Jiro-san says more than a title ever could. In sushi, that kind of span implies long exposure to the same standards, the same corrections, and the same demand that each day meet the last.

Acclaim

Rei's honors include Michelin 2 stars.