In early 2026, social media users circulated a claim that the iconic green "digital rain" in the 1999 film "The Matrix" was made up of Japanese sushi recipes.
For example, one Threads post (archived) read, "The iconic green code in The Matrix is actually just scanned Japanese sushi recipes. The Machine World is literally powered by salmon rolls."
(Threads user @raminnasibov)
In short, the claim is partly true but oversimplified. Simon Whiteley, the designer behind the code, has said he drew on his wife's Japanese cookbooks as source material and inspiration. But the final design was not simply made up of readable sushi recipes. It combined stylized Japanese characters with other symbols and visual effects to create the film's iconic digital rain.
Where the claim comes from
The rumor gained traction online in 2017, after CNET published an interview with Whiteley, a production designer at Animal Logic who designed the green rain of digital code.
In an interview titled, "Creator of The Matrix code reveals its mysterious origins," Whiteley said he liked to describe the code as being made from Japanese sushi recipes. However, he did not provide further specifics, nor did he explicitly state that the green code consisted solely of sushi recipes. The article only stated he had scanned characters from his wife's Japanese cookbooks.
How 'The Matrix' code was actually created
Whiteley revisited the code's origin in a 2019 interview on the "befores & afters" podcast, which offered a more detailed look at how the effect was designed.
He said he used Japanese katakana characters because he liked their simple visual form. Drawing on his wife's cookbooks and his children's Japanese alphabet books, he hand-drew the graphics that became the basis for the code. He then mixed in Arabic numerals and adjusted the font to resemble the green text seen on older computer monitors.
Whiteley also reversed some of the numbers and symbols to create the impression that the code was being viewed from the inside out. To give the digital rain its rough, distinctive appearance, he hand-drew the elements before digitizing them, a process that left some characters partially clipped and deliberately irregular. He then further altered the design by adding extra strokes, dots and graphic icons.
He also said the code did not originally fall downward and that the final effect developed through a broader collaborative design process, even if its visual inspiration partly came from Japanese cookbook text.
However, as Wired reported in 2019, Japanese speakers would not be able to read a full recipe from the film's digital rain. Whiteley said the design relied mainly on stylized katakana characters, whereas Japanese recipes are more commonly written using hiragana and kanji. In other words, the film's design team may have drawn from cookbook material, but the code was not presented on-screen as literal, readable sushi recipes.
When asked if a specific book inspired the code, he told Wired, "I've been kind of not wanting to tell anyone what the recipe book is, partly because that's the last bit of magic."