According to Guinness Book of World Records, this repository of all your favorite superlatives, the winning attempt was held on November 20, 2016 by the Tamana Otawara Festival Executive Committee in Tamana, Japan at the Tamana City Labor Athletic Center. While it’s no surprise that Japan claimed the title, what might shock you is the astonishing length of the list of records.
A veritable culinary army has been recruited to perform the herculean task, with around 400 people assembling the prodigious 9,332-foot, 8-inch sushi roll. As a frame of reference, Japan’s highest peak, Mount Fuji, measures 12,388 feet. To fill Tamana’s monumental sushi roll, the committee used pickled daikon radish and sesame.
Online accounts of other sushi roll records reveal that the Tamana Festival effort has rolled its competition. In 1997, 70 Seattle Center Festival volunteers collaborated to make a 100-foot-long sushi roll, which at the time held the Guinness World Record for “longest sushi roll”. Even when a group of over 300 Purchase College students teamed up with Food Network celebrity chef Jet Tila in 2017 to break the record for the world’s longest Californian sushi roll (separate from the overall record for longest sushi roll held by Japan), it still only measured “than” 504 feet, eclipsing Tila’s previous 2010 record of 422 feet set at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
