End of era for world’s biggest seafood market
TSUKIJI, Tokyo’s famous wholesale fish market, is to close down after the city government decided to open a new market further south, reports the Economist.
Some 60,000 people work in the old market, where more than 400 species, including whale meat, sea urchins, seaweed and caviar, are sold, and whole tuna is traded for six figure sums in pre-dawn auctions.
Tsukiji is the world’s biggest seafood market and a major tourist attraction in the Japanese capital.
But with Tokyo’s successful bid to host the 2020 summer Olympics, a new traffic artery will cut through Tsukiji and part of the site will become a temporary press centre.
The site, between the Sumida River and the Ginza shopping district, has be- come too small, old and crowded, said Yutaka Maeyasui, the executive in charge of moving the market. An earthquake could bring the roof down.
The new market is reportedly being built on a wharf whose soil is contaminated by the toxic effluent from a former gasworks. The clean-up and negotiations delayed the move for over a decade.
But it will have more space in its new home, at the larger location of Toyosu, in Koto, when it moves in November this year.
Many traders below Maeyasui’s office in the old market belong to families that have been there since the market opened in the 1930s, after the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923 destroyed its predecessor.
‘You won’t find anyone here who supports the relocation,’ said Chieko Oyoshi, who runs the tuna business her grandfather founded.
Big supermarket chains and wholesalers already eat into her business by dealing directly with the ports and fish farms that supply Tsukiji.
The move will kill whatever trade is left, she told the Economist.