Hangiri and Makisu: The Two Tools for Making Sushi at Home

Most people who try making sushi at home buy the rolling mat first and treat everything else as optional. Japanese home cooks would put it the other way round. The mat shapes the roll, but the rice decides whether the roll is worth eating — and the rice is made in a wide, shallow wooden tub that most sushi kits leave out.

The two objects are a pair. The hangiri (飯切 or 半切) turns hot cooked rice into sushi rice; the makisu (巻き簾) turns sushi rice and nori into a roll. Neither is complicated, both are cheap next to a good knife, and both are ruined by the same single habit. Here’s how to choose them and keep them.

The short answer

• The tub matters more than the mat. A bare-wood hangiri draws off the surplus moisture from vinegared rice, so it ends up glossy and separate rather than wet and pasty. A metal or glass bowl can’t do that.
• Size the tub to your rice, generously. One Kiso maker’s chart puts a 27 cm tub at about 2 gō of rice (a pair), 33 cm at about 5 gō (a family) and 39 cm at about 1 shō (a party).
• Wet it before every use, never soak it after. Damp wood doesn’t drink your vinegar or stain; waterlogged wood grows mould.
• For the mat, smooth side up, knot away from you. A 24–30 cm bamboo mat covers a full sheet of nori with room to spare.
• Both tools die of being put away wet. Dry them fully, somewhere airy, out of direct sun.

The hangiri

What it’s called, and what it is

You’ll see three names for the same object. Hangiri is written either 飯切 (“rice-cutting”) or 半切 (“half-cut”); handai (飯台) is common in shops; sushi-oke (寿司桶) is the plain descriptive one. They all mean a round, flat-bottomed, open tub of bare wood, much wider than it is deep, held together by hoops. The Edo-Tokyo Museum keeps a mid-Shōwa example in its folk-life collection, 40 cm across — the same shape you can buy today.

It belongs to the same family of coopered woodwork as the ohitsu, the lidded tub for keeping cooked rice, and the two are easy to confuse online. They do opposite jobs. An ohitsu is tall and enclosed so rice stays soft for hours; a hangiri is wide and open so a whole pot of rice can be spread thin, seasoned and cooled in a few minutes. Don’t buy one hoping it will do the other’s work.

Why wood, and why sawara

Sushi rice is cooked rice with a liquid poured over it while it’s hot. The vinegar mixture has to soak into the grains, and whatever doesn’t soak in has to go somewhere. In a steel bowl it pools at the bottom, and the bottom layer turns soft and sticky. In a bare-wood tub the timber takes it up. One Kiso maker puts it bluntly: when making vinegared rice you need to release the rice’s moisture appropriately, and nothing but a sushi tub does that well.

The traditional wood is sawara (椹), a cypress closely related to hinoki and one of the five protected conifers of the Kiso valley in Nagano. Makers favour the heartwood — the reddish core of the log — for its water resistance and durability. It also has a milder scent than hinoki, which matters when the whole point is to taste the rice and the vinegar.

The hoops were traditionally copper or bamboo. Copper is still the standard on good tubs; stainless steel turns up on commercial sizes, and one Tokyo workshop, Okeei — founded in Fukagawa in 1887 — now uses nickel silver on some of its pieces. The hoop is structural, not decorative: it’s what holds the staves in tension against each other.

Sizing it

Hangiri are sold by diameter in centimetres, with a rice capacity in gō (the traditional rice measure, about 180 ml of uncooked rice). Charts vary a little from maker to maker, so treat these as rough guides. This is how Shimizu Mokuzai, a sushi-tub maker in Kiso, sizes theirs:

Two things push you larger. First, the tub only works if the rice can be spread out thin; a tub filled to the hoop is just a bowl. Second, you need room to fold and turn the rice with a paddle without throwing grains over the side. If you usually cook 2 gō and sometimes make rolls for guests, a 33 cm tub is the safer buy.

Many tubs come with an optional fitted lid. It turns the hangiri into a serving vessel for chirashi-zushi — scattered sushi — and keeps the rice from drying while you roll.

Making sushi rice in it

1. Cook the rice a little firm. Use slightly less water than usual — the vinegar mixture will add liquid back.
2. Wet the tub first. Wipe the inside with a damp cloth, or fill it briefly with water and tip it out. See below for why this is not optional.
3. Turn the hot rice out and pour the vinegar over it. Pour it over the paddle so it spreads, while the rice is still steaming. Cold rice doesn’t absorb the vinegar properly.
4. Cut, don’t stir. Slice through the rice with the edge of a wet shamoji and fold it over, so the grains separate instead of being crushed into paste.
5. Fan it. An uchiwa fan — or a folded magazine — drives off the surface moisture fast. That’s what gives sushi rice its gloss. Turn the rice over as you go so the bottom cools too, and stop at roughly body temperature.
6. Cover it while you work. If you aren’t using it straight away, lay a damp cloth over the rice so the surface doesn’t dry out.

Caring for it

The routine is short, and it’s nearly the same as for every other bare-wood vessel in a Japanese kitchen:

• Before first use, draw out the resin. New tubs can smell strongly of raw wood. Makers recommend filling the tub with water plus a little vinegar, leaving it for a few hours, then rinsing. Some seams may weep at first; they close as the wood takes up water and swells.
• Before every use, dampen it. Dry bare wood soaks up vinegar and colour and lets rice stick; damp wood doesn’t.
• After use, rinse promptly. Hot or cold water and a soft brush usually do it. If you need detergent, the makers that allow it specify a small amount of mild, neutral dish soap, rinsed off well — check your maker’s guidance, because some prefer none at all.
• Never leave water standing in it. Long soaking is how wooden tubs grow mould, and it can loosen or discolour copper hoops.
• Dry it in the shade. Wipe it down and leave it somewhere airy. Direct sun, and strong blasts from a heater or air conditioner, are what crack it.
• A loose hoop is normal in a dry winter. Wood shrinks as it dries. Makers advise turning the tub upside down and tapping the hoop back into place with a hammer, with a protective plate or block between hammer and hoop.
• Surface mould usually comes off. Wipe it away; if it has gone into the grain, a light sanding removes it. Then fix the drying habit that caused it.

The makisu

What it is

A makisu is a small blind of thin bamboo strips tied together with thread, used to press a roll into an even cylinder. Bamboo is still the classic material; plastic and silicone versions exist and are easier to clean.

The size that suits most home kitchens is 24–30 cm, which covers a full sheet of nori with a margin to hold onto. The strips vary, and the variation is functional. Wider strips suit thick rolls; narrower strips suit thin ones. A mat made from triangular-section strips — the oni-sudare (鬼簾, “demon blind”) — leaves a ridged pattern and is used for datemaki, the sweet rolled omelette of New Year, rather than for sushi.

Which way up

A bamboo makisu has a front and a back. The front is the smooth, green skin side of the bamboo; that faces up. Lay the mat on your board with the strips running across, the binding thread running away from you, and the knot at the far end. Get this wrong and the roll catches on the knot just as you’re closing it.

Rolling with it

1. Dampen the mat, then wipe it. A slightly damp mat releases rice; a wet one soaks the nori. Wipe it so it’s barely moist.
2. Lay the nori shiny side down. The rough side holds rice better, and the shiny side ends up on the outside of the roll. A full sheet of nori is a nationally standard 21 × 19 cm; thin rolls (hosomaki) use a half sheet.
3. Spread the rice thinly with wet hands, leaving a strip of bare nori at the far edge to seal the roll.
4. Roll in one motion, lifting the near edge of the mat over the filling and tucking it down. Then press gently along the length through the mat to firm it up. Squeeze too hard and you push the rice out of the ends.
5. For inside-out rolls, wrap the mat in cling film. With rice on the outside, bare bamboo grabs every grain.
6. Cut with a wet knife, wiping it between cuts. A long, thin blade slices more cleanly than a short one — a yanagiba or a gyuto both work; see our guide to traditional single-bevel knives if you’re curious.

Caring for it

• Wash it straight after use. Use a brush along the strips, paying attention to the gaps where rice lodges.
• Dry it completely, then store it somewhere airy. Bamboo makisu that sit damp go mouldy quickly — this is the usual way they die. Stand it up or hang it until it is bone dry before you roll it up.
• No dishwasher. The heat and the long wet cycle are bad for both bamboo and thread.

A bamboo makisu is inexpensive enough that you can replace it when it gets tired. A hangiri is not, which is why the drying habit matters more for the tub.

How to choose

The tub is the one to invest in. It’s the reason home-made sushi rice tastes like sushi rice rather than seasoned leftovers, and a sawara hangiri that is wetted before use and dried in the shade after should last for many years.

If you’re building the rice side of a Japanese kitchen, the ohitsu and shamoji and a good rice bowl belong alongside these. Or browse hand-picked, Japan-shipped tableware for serving it on The Table.

Sources & Further Reading

• Sushi Oke — Shimizu Mokuzai, Kiso (Nagano) — A Kiso sawara workshop on why a sushi tub controls the rice’s moisture, its use of sawara heartwood, and its size chart from 27 cm (about 2 gō) to 39 cm (about 1 shō).
• How to Use and Care for Sushi Oke — Shimizu Mokuzai — The maker’s instructions for the first vinegar-water soak, wetting before use, drying away from sun and strong heating, re-seating loose hoops and dealing with mould.
• Makisu — Kikkoman Cookbook Glossary — Kikkoman on makisu materials and common 24–30 cm sizes, which side faces up and where the knot goes, oni-sudare for datemaki, and drying and dishwasher cautions.
• Hangirioke (Wooden Pail for Sushi Making) — Edo-Tokyo Museum Digital Archives — A mid-Shōwa-period sushi tub, 40 cm across, in the museum’s folk-life collection.