October 6th, 2016 — The world’s biggest fish market is Tsukiji Shijo in Tokyo, and it never stops moving.
All night long, refrigerated trucks deliver fresh fish from across Japan and frozen seafood caught around the world. At dawn, Tsukiji’s tuna wholesalers huddle in a chilly room and inspect what’s been hauled in.
“People with sense can tell the quality of the fish right away,” says wholesaler Eiji Kusumoto. “Those without? No matter how much they look at the fish, they won’t know.”
Kusumoto buys 10 to 15 giant tuna each morning at auction. He and rival fish sellers peruse and poke the tuna to decide how much they’re worth. This is serious business: a single fish once sold for $1.8 million.
When bells ring out across the auction floor, the appraisal period is over. Auctioneers holler out prices in a rhapsodic chant, and then the bidding starts.
“The bids are made by putting out your fingers — one, two, three, four. One [finger] could mean 1,000 yen, 10,000, yen, or 100,000 yen. But when you look at the fish, everyone knows which it is,” Kusumoto says.
When the auction’s done, Kusumoto’s tuna are loaded onto wooden carts and rolled to his stall on the market floor. He and his son cut the huge fish with band saws and toss the heads and other scraps into buckets. They lay the deep pink fleshy pieces out for chefs and shopkeepers to inspect.
At Tsukiji, there’s an art to that arrangement.
“We display the fish so that you can see the fat content and color easily,” Kusumoto says.
And if they do it well, they’re sold out by 11 a.m.
Kusumoto and his son are the third and fourth generation of their family to do this kind of work at Tsukiji. And they’ll likely be the last. The market is expected to close this winter.