Tsukiji
Minor my-own-horn-tooting intro: My name appears in legitimate print exactly once. Well, there is an EH is a book called Evil in Paradise. He is some kind of county commissioner embroiled in a scandal for accepting a shady loan from a developer. Also, you can search the New York Times archive and find that I share a name with a vaguely successfully and long-dead racehorse, but my name, referring to me, appears in legitimate print but once.
Way back when I was an undergrad, I worked as a research assistant for Prof. Ted Bestor. My job was to dig up info on fish markets on the American side of the North Atlantic. Embarrassingly, most of what I knew about fisheries going into the project was what I’d gleaned from Billy Joel’s song “The Downeaster Alexa.”* Over time, I did learn a number of non-Joel-related and surprisingly fascinating tidbits about the politics of fishing, the collapse of the North Atlantic cod stocks, and the gender conflict that ensued when fishermen in Maritime Canada were forced to abandon the sea and started spending way too much time in the entirely female space of their homes. Near as I can tell, nothing I did contributed much to Bestor’s own work, but I am mentioned along with dozens of other research assistants in his ethnography, Tsukiji.
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As soon as you enter the gates of Tsukiji, you have one thought: I am going to die, or at least be paralyzed. There will be some sort of grisly accident involving you and a speeding fish courier. The streets of the Tsukiji neighborhood are reasonably quiet at 6 am, but inside all is chaos, for the visitor at least. In truth, it is highly choreographed, workers focused on their tasks of zipping around on motorized carts laden with seafood, packaged and destined for one of the hundreds of loading dock spots where trucks wait to take them closer to their final destination. At intersections and while crossing aisles and streets within Tsukiji, these drivers have no interest in your curiosity about the inner market. To get there, you can play a game of fish market Frogger, but at your own risk. They don't care one way or the other.
I mentioned the inner market. That's because Tsukiji is organized into four basic parts: the outer market, which is essentially retail, an inner wholesale market, auction houses, and loading areas and delivery byways that occupy any and all spaces in between. The easiest way to give you a sense of how things work at Tsukiji would be to follow the route of the fish themselves. The king of those fish is the tuna. They are huge in bulk and fetch huge prices, thousands of dollars for the finest catches of the day. Lucky for me, they are also the most photogenic.
All of the seafood get an early start. Though it is on the water, Tsukiji's present location is more of a historical legacy than the result of logistical strategy. Fishing fleets do not dock at the market, but elsewhere in the Tokyo area where the fish are offloaded into trucks to arrive at the market hours before dawn.
The tuna, when they arrive at Tsukiji, are brought into one of the market's six auction houses. The houses are no Southeby's, rather they are basically giant fish hangars that serve as the inner arc on the bayside of the market. Once they are taken off the trucks and laid out, frozen solid on the auction house floor, a small piece of skin is cut off below the head so that buyers can inspect the quality of the meat as the inspect the day's catch. What they look for in a top-notch fish is a mystery to me, but that judgment can affect prices around the world.
Though we arrived at 6 am, the auctioning was in its final moments. Still it was impressive: a cement floor covered with these frozen torpedoes that created a low-lying fog. There is a faint resemblance other trading floors: many buyers wear hats that indicate who they are buying for and auctions are conducted with their own inscrutable set of symbols. Each takes less than 30 seconds. There are, after all, a lot of tuna to get to.
Once a tuna is sold, it is marked with a read paint...
...and loaded on those motorized carts whose main purpose is to deliver the fish to trucks or to vendors in the wholesale market. Running down tourists is only a secondary function.
Some of the tuna go onto waiting trucks for destinations unknown, some to other markets throughout Japan, but others will head to Narita Airport to be flown overseas. A number of tuna stay behind, to be expertly sliced and diced for purchase within the wholesale market by retail fish mongers, chefs, or even just ordinary citizens of Tokyo looking for the freshest of the fresh.
The Wholesale Market
The slicing and dicing may be expert, but not at all dainty. Some of the giant fish, being still frozen, are buzzed into cudgel-sized wedges with band saws. The tuna are defrosted and are carved into deep red hunks using two-foot-long knives. As the knivesmen go about their business, most ignore the tourists and prefer to concentrate on retaining all of their fingers. Others take not of your camera and give you a look that lets you know that the difference between filleting a fish and an American is negligible. You move on.
It takes no time at all for the tuna to go from fish-shaped to something we are more familiar with. There are somewhere around 1700 wholesalers in the market. Among those dealing in tuna, some offer only bulk for other mongers and restaurateurs and others prepare smaller portions ready for searing or sushi.
Typical retail market streets are not only crowded, physically and visually, but are cacophonous with sales pitches and blaring speakers, not to mention those chatty shoppers. At Tsukiji, there are no hawkers, no eager sellers giving you spiels and samples to get them into your stalls.
With all of the competition, you would think that there might be motivated selling, but Bestor's ethnography (not to mention my previous blog post) may give some clue as to why it's unnecessary. Like other business transactions in Japan, many of the sales are relationship-based. The wholesale businesses are often family affairs, with the men up front and the women at small booths in the back of each stall handling the money. Some of these businesses go back generations and long-term connections take precedence over browsing on price. In fact, shopping for the best deal is no easy feat. There are no prices posted, they are actually contingent on the relationships. Regular customers get better prices, prices that are complete opaque to browsers because they are often hashed out in code. The code is also explained in Bestor's book, if you want to try to fake it.
There are two really fun aspects of markets for me. One is the commerce and, as I've tried to convey, that is manic. Then there is the array of wares. Though hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of seafood move through Tsukiji, most vendors only offer a handful, some only one. Some are familiar (stacks of whole fish), some are more exotic (geoducks always look exotic to me), and some are just gruesome (conger eels swimming in water bloodied by their already-filleted brethren). Allow me to offer my pictures....Oh, and it didn't smell fishy at all.**
*As a side note, the Downeaster Alexa was Joel’s boat named after his daughter with Christie Brinkley. I once saw the DA, in dry dock, probably awaiting its fate during Joel’s and Brinkley’s then-ongoing divorce.
**One of my favorite quotes about how fish should really smell is from an interview with Jethro Tull frontman, Ian Anderson. Anderson was discussing his salmon farm in a radio interview. He said fish do not smell at all. They should smell like the sea, "like a mermaid's armpit."