When I was a kid, eating raw fish was considered bizarre, and admitting a love for the stuff was comparable to outing oneself as a tree-worshipper or part-time sword swallower. In its own, strange way, it was cool, but it also put one in the same category as the classmate who ate paste or the kid who sometimes set fire to things. My parents, who had lived in Asia, were huge fans of sushi and sashimi, which meant that much of my childhood was spent traveling from one squalid Japanese restaurant to another in search of honest-to-goodness fresh fish. My sisters and I usually crunched tempura while my parents gobbled down morsels of hamachi, toro, sake, and saba, rating the various venues and moaning about how good the stuff was. As time went on, the claims that this was "grownup food" started holding less and less water; by the time I was ten, the whole family was in love with raw fish.
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