Prize bluefin tuna catch hooks buyers on R9 392/kg

TOKYO: If you thought your last sushi bill was expensive, check this out: Sushi Zanmai, a Japanese restaurant chain, just paid $117 000 (R1.9 million) for a 200kg bluefin tuna.

Yes, you read that right. That’s $585, or R9 392, a kilo.

But this was not just any fish. It was the prize catch in the last New Year auction at Tsukiji, the famous, ramshackle fish market in Tokyo that will be torn down this year.

“It was a little more expensive than expected, but it’s the highest quality for its shape, colour and fat,” Kiyoshi Kimura, the owner of the restaurant chain, said at the market after the first auction of this year.

“I want our customers to be happy. It was the last auction at Tsukiji so there were many people there, and I feel everyone in the auction was deeply moved.”

The bluefin was caught off Aomori prefecture, an area famous for its tuna, and sold for almost three times as much as the most expensive fish at last year’s first auction.

But this year’s price tag was not a record: Kimura paid almost $1.8m for a 222kg tuna in 2013, when he got into a vicious bidding war with the owner of the rival sushi chain, Itamae.

The Japanese have a habit of overpaying at the first auction of the year, part of a superstition called goshugi soba, or “congratulatory price”, that acts as a wish for a good market year ahead.

It’s known that the Japanese eat about 80 percent of all bluefin tuna caught worldwide, and stocks of all three bluefin species – the Pacific, Southern and Atlantic – have fallen over the past 15 years because of overfishing, the Associated Press reported.

But this year was especially meaningful because of the impending closure of the market, the scene of pre-dawn mayhem as little motorised vehicles zoom around it, each loaded with fish, trying (or often, not trying) to avoid the tourists snapping photos.

The fish market, one of the biggest in the world, was built in 1935 but will be moved to a new location on a man-made island in Tokyo near the 2020 Olympic village in November.

Critics say the new development looks like a shopping mall, but supporters say the old market was unhygienic and dangerous given that it wasn’t made to accommodate all the tourists who flock to it. – The Washington Post