FT: From Pacific boat to Tokyo's Tsukiji Market - The Busiest Fish Emporium on Earth

Excerpt:

More fish flows into Tsukiji and out of it, into the sushi bars, restaurants, hotels, fishmongers and supermarkets of Japan's fish-devouring capital - than into any other location on earth. That makes Tsukiji, in the phrase of Theodore Bestor, an American anthropologist who has devoted much of his life to this extraordinary place, "the fish market at the centre of the world"......Prices set at Tsukiji, which move to the rhythms of Japanese fashions, holidays and the whim of its traders, set the global tone. Tsukiji is synonymous with "fish", much as, in the US, Hollywood means "movies" or Wall Street means "finance". And few things loom so large in Japanese consciousness as fish. Archaeologists have found shell mounds, dating from 3,000BC, indicating that Japanese have been raiding the oceans for sustenance from the late Stone Age...

...It turns out that Lunt has been sucked into Tsukiji's way of doing things more than he realises. He wants to treat it like a spot market but, over two decades, has become entangled in the relationships that bind the market together. His rare days off from the restaurant are regulated by the weddings and funerals of business associates. Despite his protestations, like his father-in- law, he too drops in on the same stalls each morning, even if he doesn't always buy. "Relationships, yes. They come without you realising. This guy really brought it home to me," Lunt says, gesturing to a man busily gutting a fish. "We were at the funeral of the grandmother, and we were having a few drinks afterwards, and they started reminiscing about the first time I came to Tsukiji," he says. "It was honestly the first time I realised that I am part of this world and that their histories and mine are intertwined."...

....The mystery of sushi, as every Tokyoite knows, is that it can only be eaten at the counter, never at a table. I ask the sushi master why. He smiles, perhaps not wishing to offend those customers without a counter seat. "Ah, that's because of the time and the distance," he finally ventures. "Sushi loses its taste between here and the table."

The long haul

From Pacific boat to Tokyo's Tsukiji Market - The Busiest Fish Emporium on Earth

By David Pilling

Published: June 16 2007 03:00 | Last updated: June 16 2007 03:00

It is three in the morning and I am on a fishing boat, drinking cheap sake from a plastic cup, and gnawing through my second hunk of dolphin meat. My day had started an hour earlier when, roused by a bashing on the door, I had left the warmth of my futon for the blistering cold of northern Japan in early spring. Cherry blossoms were budding in Kyushu, much further south. Here, the grass was streaked with snow.

Fumbling down an incline through the pitch black, I dimly made out the shape of a boat - more of an industrial barge - purring in the bay below. Nearby, a dozen or so fishermen, seated on tatami mats and drinking canned hot coffee, began zipping up their windbreakers against the cold. "Didn't you bring your boots?" asked one, scanning my leather shoes as though they were ballet slippers. Some rubber boots were fetched. I pulled them on and ambled towards the boat as the fisherman played with the name of my unfamiliar publication in the rough accent of northern Honshu: "Fai-nan-sharu Tai-mu-zu."

I had arranged to hitch a ride on a fishing boat from Iwate prefecture because I wanted to trace one of the thousand threads that connect Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market to the ocean. Even as we set out, hundreds of miles away, the market - both a throwback to the rough, mercantile culture of Edo Japan and the hub of the modern global fishing industry - is stirring into life. More fish flows into Tsukiji and out of it, into the sushi bars, restaurants, hotels, fishmongers and supermarkets of Japan's fish-devouring capital - than into any other location on earth. That makes Tsukiji, in the phrase of Theodore Bestor, an American anthropologist who has devoted much of his life to this extraordinary place, "the fish market at the centre of the world".

To get an idea of the scale of Tsukiji (roughly pronounced "Skiji"), compare it with Billingsgate, its British equivalent. According to a 2006 Oxford University study, Billingsgate handles roughly 25,000 tonnes of fish a year, enough to make it the world's third-biggest fish emporium. But at an annual 615,000 tonnes, Tsukiji handles in two weeks what goes through Billingsgate in a year. Given the massive volumes, what happens here affects ports, markets and sometimes dangerously depleted fish stocks the world over. Prices set at Tsukiji, which move to the rhythms of Japanese fashions, holidays and the whim of its traders, set the global tone. Tsukiji is synonymous with "fish", much as, in the US, Hollywood means "movies" or Wall Street means "finance". And few things loom so large in Japanese consciousness as fish. Archaeologists have found shell mounds, dating from 3,000BC, indicating that Japanese have been raiding the oceans for sustenance from the late Stone Age. Even today, fish account for between 40 and 50 per cent of Japan's animal protein intake, according to Bestor, compared with just 5 per cent in the US and New Zealand.

More than the sheer quantity is the extent to which fish permeate everyday life. Parents fly painted carp windsocks to celebrate each boy born to the family. Fans at baseball games munch dried squid or fried octopus balls and watch teams with names like the Hiroshima Carp. At weddings, guests are served sea bream, or tai, an aquatic pun based on the fact that omede-tai means "congratulations". Fish crop up in everyday idioms, too. A sharp rise, what might be called a "spike" in English, is unagi nobori, literally "climbing eel". Samehada, shark skin, means goose bumps. A kingyo, or goldfish, is a novice smoker who doesn't inhale, while a "goldfish poo", trailing behind, is an obsequious sidekick.

So deeply ingrained are images of the sea that, according to testimony in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, a mother, looking up in awe at the spreading mushroom cloud, mouthed: "It moves like a sea slug."

I had been on the boat only 20 minutes, but my stomach was already moving like a sea slug, too. We had slipped quietly out of the bay and chugged through the cold, squid-ink blackness. I climbed up to the deck and joined the captain in his tiny lookout, warmed by a single bar heater. He peered anxiously at the menacing black water below, ignoring the pulsing GPS screens above.

About 30 minutes out, he slowed the boat and snapped a giant floodlight on to the ocean's surface. Hundreds of white seagulls flocked through the darkness like ghosts towards us. Another boat, the mirror image of ours, pulled near. Both crews, wrapped from head to toe against the cold, began winching in the net. No one talked. As the net drew to the surface, a few flashes of silver illuminated the dark. Soon it was a wriggling mass of sardines. The boats were now close enough for the crews to shake hands, though no one did.

A yellow cylindrical net was winched into the fishy mass and then back to our boat, where it spilled its silver contents. The crew erected wooden blocks to section off the deck, which became a knee- deep soup of thrashing sardines. Suddenly it was over. The boats pulled apart, the captain turned off the floodlight, plunging the ocean back into darkness.

Now, I am pressed into the boat's tiny mess with some of the crew. We face each other in monk-like silence, our knees wedged against a rickety table on which sits my morning libation of sake. One of the crew is grilling scraps of fish. He thrusts a piece towards me, skewered on a toothpick. "It's dolphin," he says, "drowned in the nets." Surrounded by men who eke their living from the sea, it hardly occurs to me to refuse.

We visit three more fishing grounds that morning, and each time the routine is the same. In a month's time, they will be hauling tuna onto this deck, but today the crew must content itself with one 20lb king salmon, a dozen or so cod and a slew of sardines. The sun has risen as we head back to port. When the catch is good, about half is loaded off the dockside and trucked eight hours to Tsukiji. As we near shore, women, like anxious miners' wives, are waiting. They have prepared breakfast. There is rice - and lots and lots of fish.

Tsukiji's origins are said to lie with the fisherman who followed Ieyasu Tokugawa, the first shogunate ruler of a united Japan, on his 1590 march to Edo, the swampy ground that would one day become Tokyo. By 1700, Edo, originally a fishing village, had become the world's biggest city.

By order of the shogunate, all fish had to be sold through the central market at Nihonbashi, the city's gatepost. Much of it came from the then-teeming Edo bay and, by the early 19th century, restaurants in Nihonbashi had developed a new form of cuisine that capitalised on the fish's freshness. Called Edomae sushi, "in front of Edo", it differed from the traditional fermented fish of Osaka. The new delicacy was squeezed by hand around a ball of vinegared rice and eaten raw.

Those licensed to trade fish soon came to regard their monopoly as a birthright. It provided them with funds needed to attend the kabuki theatre, to drink and to visit the nearby Yoshiwara pleasure quarters.

After the Meiji Restoration, when Japan opened up to the west, pressure grew on the market to move. Theodore Bestor, the author of The Fish Market at the Center of the World, tells me: "It was considered a messy, smelly place right in the centre of what was supposed to be the financial centre of the east." The market traders held out for years until the matter was settled by the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923. Shortly after, it moved to its present site on reclaimed land: the literal meaning of Tsukiji, a place with a thousand romantic associations, is "Landfill."

Its next move could be to an equally unglamourous location - a vacant lot once owned by Tokyo Gas (see Raw deal: Tsukiji's move page 31). Market traders are already fighting to keep Tsukiji going, at the heart of city life.

The day after my Iwate fishing trip, I am up again at the crack of dawn, heading for Tsukiji by taxi. It is 4am and Tokyo - in so far as a conglomeration of 12 million people can ever be thus described - is sleeping. Harumi Avenue, the boulevard that ploughs through the normally elbow-to-elbow Ginza shopping district, is empty. But just a little further on, through an anonymous entrance lined by thrumming trucks, one enters a world where the rules and rhythms of everyday Japan do not apply (continued below).

The first thing that hits you - almost literally - is the traffic. Vehicles in Tokyo proper move with the neatness one would expect of a well-organised society. In Tsukiji, which has the atmosphere of a Turkish bazaar, there is what looks like anarchy. Despite the efforts of traffic policemen (Tsukiji has its own police force, not to mention a branch of Mizuho bank and a dedicated press corps), the rule inside the market appears to be every man for himself. Several generations of traffic compete for the same piece of road. Men on bicycles, men on foot, men pulling blood-stained wooden carts, men on motorcycles; all thread hither and thither, their Styrofoam boxes packed with fish, squeaking and wobbling as they go. Now and then, there is a scattering, as a truck lurches in. Everywhere, sputtering mechanised carts buzz like angry bluebottles through the maelstrom.

I am heading to see Keiichi Suzuki, president of Tsukiji Uoichiba, one of seven auction houses licensed to operate. Most of Tsukiji has been alive with activity since midnight, when trucks unload their supplies and handlers begin laying out the fish for that morning's auctions. But here, in the market's administrative centre, the long stone corridor is deserted.

Suzuki, a 70-year-old who has worked in the industry for half a century, is waiting in his office. It is the second time we have met. At our first meeting, in daylight hours, he was wearing a grey tweed suit that matched his neatly trimmed British accent. He spoke unromantically about the market, saying it was being throttled by giant supermarket chains and was in need of modernising. He also spoke in alarming terms about fish stocks, saying that, as China, Russia and others developed a Japanese-style appetite, he feared for the industry - and the planet.

Today, he looks quite different, dressed in blue overalls and rubber boots. "Shall we go?" he asks, trotting off briskly. "First we'll go and see uni, the sea urchin. Uni are always first." He opens an unmarked door, and we step into what looks like a gem shop. Arranged in little wooden trays are row upon row of amber- coloured sea urchin, a creamy delicacy mostly served as sushi. In a high-class establishment, a single mouthful can cost anything from $10.

Men, each with a number pinned to their cap, are milling around, inspecting the uni. Each type is slightly different; this one from Russia is paler than that from Hakodate, which differs again from the Aomori, Shikoku and Boston uni. To preserve delicate distinctions, smoking is prohibited. (continued below)

Suddenly, a few men who have been lolling on child-sized wooden bleachers spring into action, engaging in a series of mysterious hand movements. (The market has its own slang and even its own counting system where, for example, three is geta, after wooden sandals with a three-grooved sole.) Within minutes, the secret gestures stop, and the uni that will be gobbled in Tokyo that day has been sold.

The people in caps are the nakaoroshi gyohsha, the "intermediate wholesalers", who work for the 1,677 Tsukiji stalls licensed to sell to outsiders. Many of these licences have been in the same family for generations and, without one, it is not permitted to bid, however deep one's pockets. This makes the intermediate wholesalers one tier in an immensely complex stack of suppliers who aggregate catches from thousands of boats before sorting them on the way to the customer. The nakaoroshi gyohsha stand, according to Bestor, at least two - and as many as five - stages removed from both the boat that caught the fish and the person who will eventually eat it. (continued below)

After the sea urchin, Suzuki leads me through several other auctions, including live fish and shrimp, to the tuna floor. The vast auction hall is laid out with hundreds of neatly arranged whole tuna, maguro, each with its tail removed and placed like a decoration in the gills. Unlike the flash-frozen tuna hunted by vessels that spend months at sea, these are fresh. A few have been caught off the Japanese coast, but most are from Guam, Sri Lanka, Spain and Mexico. They have been air-freighted in via Tokyo's Narita airport, "Japan's leading fishing harbour" as it is jokingly known, so dependent on global fish stocks have the Japanese become.

As the tuna are auctioned off, they are wheeled out on long thin carts to the adjacent stalls. This is the impenetrable, water- soaked labyrinth where Tsukiji's wholesalers sell to the many thousand buyers from the sushi bars, restaurants, fishmongers and supermarkets that keep Tokyo fed.

Among them is Kajibashi-san, and the first thing to know about him is that he is late. He is always late. For more than 20 years, he has been arriving at the market at around 10am, several hours after most buyers have come and gone. He probably would not like the term, but Kajibashi-san is the catfish of Tsukiji, picking up leftovers others have neglected. "At this time of day, we are shoulder to shoulder with housewives," he says on the morning I accompany him, referring to the few retail customers who venture into the market's inner sanctum. "The difference, of course," he says, patting his substantial wallet, "is that I have the buying power and I have the face."

The second thing to know about Kajibashi-san is that his real name is Andy Lunt, and he hails from Leicester, England. He is a Tokyo institution: the only foreigner to buy regularly from Tsukiji's intermediate wholesalers, and a constant presence in Shin Hinomoto, a sashimi-and-grilled-fish restaurant wedged beneath an overhead railway line. Kajibashi-san is his yago, the guild name bestowed on each of the Tsukiji regulars.

Lunt, a tall, muscular 48-year-old with a shiny shaved head, cuts a distinctive figure in Tsukiji. Once a rock musician, he came to Tokyo in 1985 with the Japanese bride he had married in Britain. "I arrived on a Saturday and on the Monday I was taken to Tsukiji, where I was told to meet my father-in-law. And that was it," he says. "I was handed a bag of money and for a year I followed him around the market. At the end of the year he said: 'Right, you've seen the four seasons. Off you go.'"

Lunt makes the rounds of Tsukiji most mornings, prepares fish all afternoon and presides over his restaurant until midnight. The family he married into has owned restaurants for generations, moving to Tsukiji from Nihonbashi when the market was relocated in the 1920s. His father-in-law, who still does the Tsukiji buying run every Monday, conducts business the old way. "He has five or six stalls that he goes to religiously, because they're the people he can trust to give him a decent deal," says Lunt, who feels the younger Tsukiji generation has a different take on things. "Those comfortable relationships have just disintegrated. They mean nothing. This is a market. What's available and the price of everything fluctuates daily according to supply and demand - it's up to me to take advantage of that."

Following Lunt around is halfway between a trip to an aquarium and a slaughterhouse. Some 400 varieties of seafood are on sale, many still alive in tanks or shallow vats of water. Live crabs are covered in sawdust to keep them moist; octopuses are kept in mesh bags to stop them from cannibalising each other.

The Japanese are obsessive about freshness, sometimes to the point of eating sashimi while the fish's tail still wriggles, or swallowing tiny live fish, a style known as odori gui, "dancing in the mouth". At the back of each cramped stall - whose position in the market is regularly changed by lottery to prevent lasting advantage - is a chopping board. Most are saturated with blood. The squeamish would not last long at Tsukiji, yet even here they acknowledge the term zankoku ryori, "cruel cuisine". Each year, says Bestor, eel dealers make the trek to Mount Takao near Tokyo to pray at a temple for warding off eye disease. The idea is to stop revenge from the spirits of eels, skinned alive while pinned to the chopping board by their eye.

Lunt is hunting bargains. Today, Iwate oysters, normally pricier than those from Hiroshima, are good value. He picks up some kanpachi, a type of amberjack, and a tachiuo, "belt fish", a dazzling silver creature as long as a human arm. At another stall, Lunt rejects farmed green sea slugs in favour of wild red ones and debates the quality of monkfish liver, ankimo, a pate-like delicacy. At yet another, he stops for nodoguro, a Japanese blue fish, which he grills whole if he can get the price down.

It turns out that Lunt has been sucked into Tsukiji's way of doing things more than he realises. He wants to treat it like a spot market but, over two decades, has become entangled in the relationships that bind the market together. His rare days off from the restaurant are regulated by the weddings and funerals of business associates. Despite his protestations, like his father-in- law, he too drops in on the same stalls each morning, even if he doesn't always buy. "Relationships, yes. They come without you realising. This guy really brought it home to me," Lunt says, gesturing to a man busily gutting a fish. "We were at the funeral of the grandmother, and we were having a few drinks afterwards, and they started reminiscing about the first time I came to Tsukiji," he says. "It was honestly the first time I realised that I am part of this world and that their histories and mine are intertwined."

Not far from Tsukiji, in a back street near Kachidoki Bridge, is a sushi restaurant. One enters through a sliding, slatted door. Behind a long wooden counter stand three sushi chefs, each in white apron and white cap.

In a glass case running the length of the counter are fish from Japan and far beyond: small, precious, quantities of fatty tuna, red clam, octopus, squid, sea urchin, plump orange salmon roe, fluke, horse mackerel, eel, sweet shrimp, yellow tail and more. The chef wields his $1,000 blade in silence, slicing a tiny strip of fish before pressing it, with a daub of green wasabi horseradish, onto a perfectly formed oblong of rice.

The mystery of sushi, as every Tokyoite knows, is that it can only be eaten at the counter, never at a table. I ask the sushi master why. He smiles, perhaps not wishing to offend those customers without a counter seat. "Ah, that's because of the time and the distance," he finally ventures. "Sushi loses its taste between here and the table."

It seems a nonsensical thing to say about a piece of fish that has been shipped hundreds, if not thousands, of miles before ending up in this corner of Tokyo. Yet any sushi addict knows that the final few feet can be deadly. I am sat safely at the counter, savouring a sublimely tender piece of sea bream. That its journey and mine should both have ended here is down to fate - and to Tsukiji.

David Pilling is the FT's Tokyo bureau chief.

Raw deal? Tsukiji's move

Tsukiji may soon go the way of markets the world over if, as planned, it is banished to the suburbs in 2014, to a vacant lot once owned by Tokyo Gas. Supporters of the move argue that Tsukiji is cramped and dilapidated, incapable of meeting modern hygiene standards. It also sits on prime real estate; outside its gates glitzy department stores and overpriced hostess bars jostle for space.

Theodore Bestor, an American expert on Tsukiji, says pressure for the move parallels the government push in the 1920s to drive the market from the Nihonbashi financial centre: "The sentimental side of me thinks it is a shame that the city will lose something it will never get back - Tokyo's only viable remnant of an old mercantile culture."

Yet at least some in the market - including Keiichi Suzuki, president of one of the auction houses - favour a move to better- equipped facilities. Sasha Issenberg, author of The Sushi Economy, leans to the practical view. No one, he says, laments the move of Fulton Fish Market a few years ago from downtown New York. And while Tsukiji cannot be compared with the old Fulton - it is more hygienic and less tainted by mob rule - international logistics make a market's location less relevant to a city's life. Tokyo, Issenberg says, can live without its "smelly monument to nostalgia".

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007

(photos from Google Image Search and Wikipedia, not from original article)