Tsukiji Fish Market

Tuna Sets New Record At Tokyo Auction

Filed under: Dining

The first sale of the year at at the Tsukiji fish market auction in Tokyo traditionally brings high prices and this year is off to a booming start. A 754-pound tuna sold for a record 32.49 million yen, or nearly $396,000 in the first auction of the year on Wednesday. That works out to over $526 a pound. The previous record was set back in 2001 when a 445-pound fish sold for 20.2 million yen. The fish was caught off the coast of northern Japan and was one of over 500 shipped in for the auction.

The exceptionally large fish was bought by the owners of Kyubey, an upscale sushi restaurant in Tokyo's Ginza district, and Itamae Sushi, a casual, Hong Kong-based chain. Japan continues to be the world's biggest consumer of seafood, with Japanese eating 80 percent of the Atlantic and Pacific bluefins caught. Many restaurants around the world have taken bluefin tuna off their menus in a response to reports that overfishing is causing decline in tuna stocks. Last year the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas voted to cut the bluefin fishing quota in the eastern Atlantic and Mediterranean from 13,500 to 12,900 metric tons annually, a move that was seen as not nearly drastic enough to ease the problem of decimated tuna populations in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.

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The $100,000 Tuna

by Deidre Woollard (RSS feed) —

Filed under: Dining

It may not look like much but the 282-pound Japanese bluefin tuna shown above brought in more than $100,000 at auction recently. Two sushi bar owners, one in Hong Kong and one in Japan, paid $104,700 for the big fish at a Tokyo fish auction on Monday. The price was about ten times the average price and the highest in nearly a decade. The first sale of the new year traditionally brings hight prices but the prices were even higher because of a shortage of high quality Oma bluefin. There were just three available at the Tsukiji market compared with 41 last year. A smaller imported bluefin caught off the cost of the U.S. sold for $15,400. Members of international tuna conservation organizations have agreed to cut their bluefin catch quota for 2009 by 20 percent to 22,000 tons which could mean more high prices this year.

For a great behind-the-scenes look at the world of tuna sales, I recommend The Sushi Economy by Sasha Issenberg, it's got some fantastic descriptions of the chaos and commerce in Japan's tuna auctions. It also explains that the tuna's tail is sliced off (as shown above) at auction to expose the quality of the flesh.

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Tags: fish, japan, sushi, tsukiji fish market, TsukijiFishMarket, tuna