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".
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