Located only blocks from Tokyo's glittering Ginza, Tsukiji--the world's largest marketplace for seafood--is a prominent landmark, well known but little understood by most Tokyoites: a supplier for countless fishmongers and sushi chefs, and a popular and fascinating destination for foreign tourists.
Early every morning, the worlds of hi-tech and pre-tech trade noisily converge as tens of thousands of tons of seafood from every ocean of the world quickly change hands in Tsukiji's auctions and in the marketplace's hundreds of tiny stalls.
In this absorbing firsthand study, Theodore C. Bestor--who has spent a dozen years doing fieldwork at fish markets and fishing ports in Japan, North America, Korea, and Europe--explains the complex social institutions that organize Tsukiji's auctions and the supply lines leading to and from them and illuminates trends of Japan's economic growth, changes in distribution and consumption, and the increasing globalization of the seafood trade.
As he brings to life the sights and sounds of the marketplace, he reveals Tsukiji's rich internal culture, its place in Japanese cuisine, and the mercantile traditions that have shaped the marketplace since the early seventeenth century.
Table of Contents
1 Tokyo's pantry 1
2 Grooved channels 50
3 From landfill to marketplace 91
4 The raw and the cooked 126
5 Visible hands 177
6 Family firm 214
7 Trading places 245
8 Full circle 295
App. 1 Visiting Tsukiji 313
Tsukiji is closely attuned to the subtleties of Japanese food culture and to the representations of national cultural identity that cloak cuisine, but this is also the market that drives the global fishing industry, from sea urchin divers in Maine to shrimp farmers in Thailand, from Japanese long-liners in the Indian Ocean to Croatian tuna ranchers in the Adriatic.
The Tsukiji central wholesale market is the world's largest marketplace for fresh, frozen, and processed seafood, a market where almost 50'000 people come each day to buy and sell seafood that will feed many of the Tokyo's region 22 million residents.
Traders at Tsukiji operate in a complex social and economic framework of individual alliances and overarching institutional arrangements.
Corporations, cartels, and markets should be of as much interest to anthropologists as communities, clans, and matrinlineages.
...at Tsukiji many prices are not posted and sellers determine what to charge based at least in part by calculations of personal connection. Prices therefore are communicated among shop staff in code...
To preserve secrecy over prices offered to different customers, many stalls at Tsukiji use distinctive codes known as fuchô when employees discuss prices among themselves.
Even though the shogunate exercised tight control over economic activity in general, merchants of the period developed highly sophisticated commercial practices, perhaps in part because the feudal authorities had no conception of a market economy and could hardly recognize it as such, let alone formulate rules to contain it effectively.
In the early eighteenth century, the Osaka rice futures market " developed without any guidance from financial authorities...a market that materialized solely in response to the needs of market participants," without either a priori economic theorizing or the institutionalized regulatory authority that characterizes contemporary futures markets.
...the culinary logic of commodification, whereby fish become food to which economic values are attached.
Many of the present varieties of sushi made with extremely fresh seafood were not even possible until the advent of mechanical refrigeration in the mid-twentieth century. And tastes have have changed dramatically as well: until about a generation ago, toro - the fatty flesh from tuna bellies that is now the quintessential high-prices sushi topping - was held in such poor regard that it was given away as cat food.
Tsukiji's auctions proceed at a lightning speed, in cryptic exchanges between the auctioneers' throaty growls and the silent hand gestures of impassive buyers. Auctioneers cultivate showmanship and style that rivet attention on them; with voices like chainsaws and staccato hand gestures they command center stage as they pull out the bids during their brief minutes on the block. They can roar trough a dozen lots in only a minute or two, and an outsider can barely tell who got each lot and for what price. A burst of abbreviated jargon; a blur of waving hands; quickly, almost imperceptible gestures: all signify prices asked and offered, then a slae is over.
This function of a market system is "bulking and breaking."
Three sets of transactional relationships structure Tsukiji's auctions: on one level, those between auction houses and their suppliers, whose products furnish Tsukiji; on another, those between auction houses and the intermediate wholesalers, who purchase their stock at Tsukiji's auctions; and on the third, those between these these traders and their own clients: retailers and restaurateurs.
By virtue of its size, the massive Tsukiji marketplace is unique. No other market in Japan - no other market in the world - handles the volume of seafood that passes trough its auctions daily: some 2,345 metric tons.
So on any given morning there are, in effect, perhaps a hundred separate auctions, with most commodity categories being the object of four, five, or seven distinct auction sequences.
The most crucial aim of the competition among auction houses is to be the market maker.