In Japan, fish is not just food, it is sublime art, finely honed craft and an integral marker of national identity. Alongside the imperial palace and cutting-edge museums, one of Tokyo’s most popular tourist attractions is a fish market: Tsukiji. Visitors, limited to a daily quota of 120, queue up all night to catch a glimpse of the tuna auction that takes place before sunrise.
In operation since 1935, Tsukiji is one of the few organic connections that the capital city retains with its pre-Second World War, mercantile past. The market has remained unrepentantly low-tech, crammed with wooden crates, giant ice-blocks and the finest, freshest, fish that money can buy. That can be quite a lot of money. At the last New Year auction, a bidder paid 36.45 million yen ($3,23,000) for a giant, bluefin tuna.
There are about 900 businesses in Tsukiji that handle almost 500 kinds of seafood, from whale meat, to sea urchins, chalking up business worth $14 million daily. Over 1,800 tonnes of seafood pass through the market every day. Orders are scribbled in notebooks with pencil stubs rather than on computers. This is one corner of Tokyo that is neither sterile nor silent, but gloriously chaotic, an anachronistic sliver of a different era.
Safety of concerns
More precisely, it was such a corner. On October 6, this Mecca of fish will close for business and relocate, ending years of controversy and scandal. Plans to shut down Tsukiji were prompted by fears of overcrowding and safety. With some 60,000 people crammed inside the antiquated facility, there were valid doubts about the market’s earthquake resistance, sanitation and fire safety.
However, many vendors and customers protested against the idea, fearing that relocation to the more sterile environs of the new site would destroy the rich social history and hard-to-replicate atmosphere of the original market. Moreover, the new location, Toyusu, about 2.3 km to the east of Tsukiji, is a wharf whose soil and groundwater proved to be contaminated by toxic effluents from a former gasworks. The proposed relocation was consequently stalled two years ago, shortly after Yuriko Koike was elected the first woman Governor of Tokyo. Ms. Koike discovered that contractors had failed to fill in a basement at Toyosu with clean soil as a buffer against the underground pollutants. She halted the move and ultimately the local government paid hundreds of millions of dollars to clean up the new facility. The relocation is now finally going ahead.
Tokyo is in a period of mourning. Newspapers like the Mainichi Daily are running a series on the last days of the market, featuring sellers waxing eloquent about leaving behind tables notched by years of cutting fish, and even nostalgic pieces on the 450 blocks of 150-kg ice that were manufactured every day at the market’s ice plants.
Long-term plans for the site remain fluid, with Ms. Koike claiming that some market operations at Tsukiji may restart after five years. In the interim, the 57-acre plot will serve as a transportation hub during the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.
But, the most pressing problem facing the municipal authorities is the prospect of the tens of thousands of rats that might suddenly be at a loose end, the fish-cuts that they subsist on having disappeared.
To prevent a mass exodus, Tokyo officials are reportedly busy blocking pipe and sewer exits, plugging holes in fences with corrugated sheets and installing 40,000 sticky sheets and rat traps.
Pallavi Aiyar is a journalist and writer based in Tokyo.