Marketmen leave offerings of sake at these deific figures. Outside the shrine are stone monuments honoring the seafood that passes through Tsukiji: a big black sculpted fish, a big egg-like roe. Near the Kaiko Bridge entrance, tucked away in relative serenity, an altar bell is rung by rope at the Namiyoke Jinja, a small Shinto shrine whose name can be translated as the Shrine to Protect from Waves. Tsukiji occupies about 22½ hectares on the Sumida River-about 55½ acres, or well over two million square feet: bigger than 40 football fields. The Fulton Fish Market, in New York City, the second-largest fish market in the world, moves only 115 tons a year, an average of less than half a ton each working day. Two million kilos is about four and a half million pounds, more than 2,000 tons. This is minuscule by comparison with the roughly two million kilograms of seafood Tsukiji handles every day." "My guess, and it is a guess," says Ted Bestor, "would be that the total amounts are probably on the order of a thousand or two kilograms worldwide each day. It's hard to say how much of what is sold at Tsukiji is exported to high-class sushi chefs abroad. Tsunenori Iida, whose great-grandfather had a fish-selling stall at the old market, is one of only four men whose family businesses began at Nihonbashi and are still in operation at Tsukiji today. Nihonbashi was gone, and a new market came into being in the town of Tsukiji, within Tokyo. On September 1, 1923, Tokyo was devastated by the Great Kanto Earthquake, which killed more than 140,000 people. This place, the all of it-formally the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Central Wholesale Market, a name by which few know it-is, as Ted Bestor puts it, the "fishmonger for the seven seas." Its history reaches back 400 years, to the Nihonbashi fish market, which was located not far from the present site of Tsukiji, in the Chuo Ward. Being from Newark, I wonder if they ever douse these things with dye. The northern-Japanese uni can fetch about ¥7,000, or about $60, for a little, 100-gram box, while the Maine uni go for much less, from a low of about ¥800 to a high of about ¥1,500, or between $6 and $13. Color means more than size, and men roam the hall before the auction, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee from paper cups, searching for uni of the most vibrant orange-golden hues. Only in July, when sea urchins from the United States aren't available, are these boxes of uni not present. But much of the uni laid out here in little boxes, often repackaged in Hokkaido, comes from California or Maine. The most prized uni come from Hokkaido and its islands, and it's said that if you want to taste the best, freshest uni you must go there and eat it straight from the sea. At five in the morning, preceding the tuna auction, in another hall, there's the sea-urchin-roe auction. Tuna is the main event at Tsukiji, but everything from the sea-fresh fish, live fish, shrimp-is auctioned and sold here. I had absolutely no idea of what a tuna looked like, its size or anything else." And tuna, of course, was something that appeared only in cans like hockey pucks and ended up in sandwiches. As far as I knew, fish came frozen, already breaded and cut into oblongs for frying. "I grew up in central Illinois," Ted told me, "and as a kid I don't remember ever eating fresh fish. It was Ted who taught me how to correctly pronounce the name of this place: "tskee-gee." (In her new book, The Sushi Economy, Sasha Issenberg says it's "pronounced roughly like 'squeegee,'" but it's not. He, the chair of the Anthropology Department of Harvard, and I, the chair of nothing, spent some time together in Tokyo. Bestor is the author of Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World, the standard work on the subject. The only tuna that people ate, the white stuff, also in cans, was processed from smaller, albacore tuna, and even that probably would not have gotten into the American diet if a California cannery hadn't run out of sardines and begun selling it in 1903. Nobody ever ate it, and its sole commercial use was as an ingredient in canned cat food. Until the summer of 1972, bluefin tuna was basically worthless to American fishermen. And everything around him is a lot, for we are in the frantic heart of a madness unto itself: the wild, engulfing, blood-drenched madness of Tsukiji. Everything around him seems to turn still for a breath as he draws the blade toward him and lays open the tuna with surgical precision.
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