Among Tokyo’s Tabelog-silver sushi restaurants, Sushi Shunji is the star disciple who formally received noren-wake independence from Sushi Saito. We happened to get the chance to visit right before the whole restaurant relocates to Toyama.
The contrast is striking. Carrying a name this formidable and heavy, Hashiba Shunji himself is not the sharp, outward-projecting type at all — rather cautious, meticulous, with a real sense of line.

🧑‍🍳Master Hashiba Shunji, born 1986. He studied early on at Hattori Nutrition College, entered the sushi trade while still a student, and then trained for a long stretch within the Sushi Kanesaka and Sushi Saito lineages, long regarded as one of the most closely watched disciples of the Saito school. He went independent in 2020 to open Sushi Shunji, and its reputation has kept climbing over the past two years. Under the 2026 Tabelog rating system adjustment, it also rose to Tabelog-silver.

The overall style is clean and disciplined. The framework is clear, the execution polished, and while the nigiri run on the smaller side, they carry a very distinct sense of line. The sake-pairing dishes add a bit more expressiveness on top of a traditional base.
When it comes to the sushi itself, you can tell he’s skilled at leveraging seasonal ingredients to their advantage. Completion, cohesion, and rhythm are all on point, yet the sushi still carries a clear personal presence.
Take the beautiful seasonal shellfish, presented in different combinations across both the sake dishes and the sushi to show off their character. There’s also tuna nearing the end of its season, with chutoro and otoro each anchoring their own memorable point. Kohada, one of the few silver-skinned fish to appear, turns out to exist here with barely any dehydration, remarkably soft.
If there’s one imperfection, it’s a slight loss of balance toward the end — the sweetness of the tamagoyaki and dessert somewhat breaks the overall balance of the meal.

Looking back on the whole meal, what surprisingly left the deepest impression was actually the proprietress. Every transition at the counter, every bit of atmosphere, was held up by her words. She opens up a guest’s comfort zone in a way that feels entirely natural, taking the other person’s world as its starting point — dropping in a topic here and there to ease everyone’s mood, and catching every flicker of curiosity from the counter during the moments the master is bent over cutting fish.
Having eaten at many sushi restaurants, this is one of the rare ones where the proprietress standing at the counter makes the entire restaurant feel more complete, more settled — and she’s become an inseparable part of what makes this counter memorable.

🥢
Shari
Ehime seaweed soup
Fried grouper
Fugu skin with monkfish liver, fūshōsuiki style
Whelk and hokkigai in miso
Tuna cheek
🍣
Yariika
Sea bream
Chutoro
Kohada
Clam
Ark shell
Hokke
Otoro
Kuruma shrimp
Akami
Shrimp head
Anago futomaki
Tamagoyaki

The food’s memory settles on small and beautiful, and the meal’s finest details belong entirely to the proprietress.
Already looking forward to visiting the Toyama location.

🍣Sushi Shunji
💰¥60,000++