The titans of tuna
A day in the life of Toyosu, the world’s greatest fish market
The best sashimi chefs on the planet rely on Japan’s Wall Street of seafood
Around him underlings cut and package fish.
Like much of Tokyo, his stall is not exactly cramped but has little space to spare.
He navigates through a maze of tanks holding twitching prawns and seething crabs; blue buckets in which fish swim in anxious tight circles, as if aware that plates and chopsticks await; and stacks of white boxes packed with seafood of all kinds—apologising for his paltry inventory.
A typhoon the previous day grounded planes across Japan, halting deliveries.
What looks like abundance is only a tenth of his usual daily trade, Mr Yamazaki explains.
Toyosu, where Mr Yamazaki has worked since it opened, is the biggest fish market in the world.
It employs around 42,000 people and shifts more than a quarter of all fish sold in Japan, worth ¥2bn ($12.9m) on an average day.
It is central to Japanese cuisine—and not just in Japan.
Chefs from Europe, America and Australia pay handsomely for fish from Toyosu.
To understand what makes this market exceptional, follow a hypothetical tuna from sea to plate, via Toyosu.
Why, of the roughly 500 types of seafood on offer, choose tuna?
First, because no country eats more of it than Japan, and Toyosu almost certainly sells more fine tuna than anywhere else.
Early-morning auctions, at which around 170 fresh and 830 frozen tuna are sold each day, attract both tourists and the best fish: fleets send them to Tokyo from as far away as New England and the Horn of Africa.
Tuna is to Toyosu what Old Master paintings are to Sotheby’s: one can buy them elsewhere, but Toyosu is the market-maker.
Many assume that tuna bought from Japan is superior because of the species, or where they are caught.
That is partly true: bluefin tuna, which tend to be fattier than other species, fetch higher prices than the leaner bigeye and yellowfin, while skipjack and albacore often end up in cans.
But holding species equal, the way a fish is caught and processed matters immensely to how it tastes—and therefore to its value.
Photograph: Ko Sasaki
Photograph: Ko SasakiOur journey begins on a hook.
Expert tuna fishermen avoid nets, which make the creature thrash around in fear, producing lactic acid and adrenaline that mar its taste and texture.
Instead, they reel it in slowly, and then begin a process called ikejime.
First, they drive a spike into its brain, killing it instantly to avoid a stress reaction that ruins the meat.
Then they remove the tail fin and slice beneath the gills to bleed the fish while its heart is still beating.
Blood contributes to spoilage through bacterial growth; properly bled fish will last longer.
Robby Cook, head chef at Coral Omakase in Manhattan, says that the tuna he has shipped from Toyosu “has no smell [and] will keep a week, a week and a half”, properly refrigerated—and will taste richer as it ages.
With the tail fin removed, they run a long, stiff wire into the fish to destroy its spinal cord and prevent rigor mortis.
Once killed, bled and paralysed the fish goes into the freezer—or, if sold fresh, is submerged in an ice-and-water slurry.
Fin tech
This sounds time-consuming, but one morning your correspondent watches a pair of workers at Toyosu perform ikejime on a tank full of live fish.
One grabs the fish with one hand and cuts its head and tail off with the other, while another plunges a wire through the tail, cuts into the fish’s back, yanks the wire up and down a few times and drops the fish into a box of ice and water.
It takes less than 15 seconds per fish.
A boat with a freezer full of fish arrives back at port after ten months at sea.
Our tuna is loaded into a freezer lorry and driven north to Toyosu.
It arrives in time to let buyers inspect it before the auction, which begins around 5.30am, so the roads will be relatively empty.
Photograph: Ko Sasaki
Photograph: Ko SasakiToyosu, which opened in 2018, was designed for an age of lorries, air-conditioning and exports.
Its predecessor, Tsukiji, a fish market in the centre of Tokyo, was more convenient for chefs but cramped, dilapidated and open to the elements, requiring dollops of ice and ingenuity in the summer heat.
From its opening in 1935 until 1987 it also had a train running through it.
The director of one of the market’s seven wholesalers put it bluntly: “Working in Tsukiji was hell.”
Toyosu, by contrast, sprawls across 40.7 hectares (around 100 acres) of reclaimed land south of Tokyo proper.
A coal gasification plant once sat on the site, so it needed a long clean-up.
From decision to completion, the move from Tsukiji to Toyosu took 17 years.
Toyosu is made up of three main buildings: one for auctions, one for wholesalers, and one for fruit and vegetables.
The second building is the largest; it also has a floor with restaurants for tourists and another selling dry goods and supplies: knives, aprons and rubber boots for the market floor, as well as miso, sake, pickles and other essentials for a restaurant kitchen.
Tsukiji was often called “Tokyo’s pantry”: built before the second world war, it boomed with Japan’s wealth and population.
Today that population is falling and eating less fish, so exports are increasingly important (see charts).
Toyosu has markedly better access for the 19,000 trucks that come daily, which helps.
During the wee hours workers bring the tuna up from the loading docks to the auction floor and lay it on a pallet.
It has already been consigned to, or bought by, one of the five wholesalers that sell fresh and live fish.
(Two others deal in smoked, salted and dried fish.)
These wholesalers are often part of large, listed, vertically integrated fishing firms; they take a 5.5% commission on each sale.
Before the auction, the floor is a hive of silent activity.
The frozen tuna—headless, tailless ovals with icy white skin, laid out in long rows—look more like munitions than fish.
Atop each sits a sticker detailing provenance and weight, as well as a thick slice cut from the tail so buyers can see the colour.
Some use hooked picks to dig out small chunks of flesh, kneading it as they walk around to determine the fat content through feel.
Most carry clipboards; some acknowledge each other with a brief nod.
Mekiki, experts in fish evaluation, set the floor price for each fish.
Around 5.30am an auctioneer rings a bell and sales begin.
Fresh bluefin tuna fetch the highest prices: an average of $25 per kilo between January and August 2024, with the priciest fish fetching $750,000 on January 5th.
Auctioneers chant rhythmically, keeping up a patter as buyers show interest with idiosyncratic hand signals and, because two houses often hold auctions simultaneously right next to each other, with eye contact.
Buyers wear baseball caps with plastic plackets bearing the names of their firms; officials from Tokyo’s government, which owns the market, wear blue caps and watch out for collusion.
Yamaharu, a shop in Toyosu fish market / Photograph: Ko Sasaki
Fish and seafood are sold in different forms at Yamaharu in Toyosu fish market / Photograph: Ko SasakiThe action is hard to follow, relying on subtle gestures and clues.
Workers load bought fish onto hand trucks, and then small pickups that zip around the market, sending distracted walkers scurrying.
The auction may look like raw capitalism, but is managed: only five companies are allowed to sell, and only certain species are flogged.
Wholesalers are quick to say that they do not want to put their rivals out of business.
Threats to their livelihood come not from neighbours, but from retailers bypassing the market and buying directly from fishing firms.
Many outfits at Toyosu stretch back generations, often linked through kinship and marriage.
Good behaviour and bad are remembered, and in time rewarded and punished.
In his magnificent book “Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Centre of the World”, Ted Bestor, an anthropologist, argued that intermediate wholesalers “define much of the character of the marketplace”.
The seven big wholesalers deal with shippers and suppliers; intermediates sell to restaurant groups, supermarkets and chefs.
Many are family firms.
The smallest may have just two employees: the husband or son who handles the fish, and the wife or mother who keeps the books.
(Toyosu remains very male; book-keeping is the only job mostly held by women.)
Net profits
The number of intermediate wholesalers has fallen from nearly 1,700 in the mid-1960s to 457 today.
Many small firms refused, or were unable, to move to Toyosu.
Others have merged.
They are laid out on what look like streets that line their building’s ground floor: cheek by jowl, with some large enough to have hefty fish tanks, a dozen workers and butchering tables big enough for an entire tuna and an arm-size knife to cut it.
Some specialise, selling just tuna or eel, but many are generalists.
Mr Yamazaki’s firm sells around 300 types of fish, changing them seasonally, often with fanfare.
Posters announce the year’s first Pacific saury, a sleek, bony fish, delicious grilled, whose arrival heralds the coming of autumn.
Each day his firm buys around 20,000kg of fish from the big wholesalers, selling them for an average of ¥36m ($238,000).
Photograph: Ko Sasaki
Photograph: Ko SasakiRelationships between wholesaler and buyer can last years, even generations.
The former’s success depends not just on expertise in choosing fish, but on knowing clients’ tastes and anticipating their needs.
A wall of Mr Yamazaki’s shop is taken up with tanks of live prawns, each with a slightly different temperature and salinity.
From one tank he pulls a prawn, and from another another; they appear identical.
But the first, he explains, is five grams lighter, and so more suited to the small sakizuke (amuse-bouche) that begins a multi-course kaiseki dinner.
The heavier one is better for tempura.
If they were reversed, the former would look slightly too large, and might leave the diner feeling too full; the latter would seem too stingy.
The three-wheeled truck holding our tuna flits through a network of underground passages until it reaches the wholesaler who bought it.
By 7am the auction floor is mostly empty and being hosed down; activity now picks up in the other building.
Stalls do not display prices, and often charge regular customers less than they would occasional ones.
Buyers for supermarkets, restaurant groups and overseas chefs make big purchases at multiple stalls.
Individual chefs, such as Arakawa Takehiro, who runs Sushi Dan in the upscale neighbourhood of Hiroo, buy a few days’ worth of tuna and an assortment of other fish.
Mr Arakawa strides purposefully through the market—like most chefs, he has long relationships with specific wholesalers, and he would no more desert them to save a few yen than they would overcharge him.
But he still greets workers at a few stalls where he buys nothing: a quick doff of his Dodgers cap, a shouted “Good morning” and a polite bow.
At one stall, he points out a cornetfish, which looks like a sinuous red magic-marker with pitiless bovine eyes (“It tastes like a cross between snapper and shrimp”).
At another, he reaches into a bucket and gently squeezes a horse mackerel (“The belly should feel full”).
At a third, he points to a bucket of writhing loach (“Cook them in a deep pot with egg and soy sauce”).
His fish bought, he goes upstairs to the dry-goods floor for kombu, kelp sold in brittle squares, and katsuobushi, dried smoked skipjack; the two ingredients are essential to dashi, Japanese cuisine’s foundational stock.
Naturally, Mr Arakawa makes his own.
Photograph: Ko SasakiBy 8am the tuna has been butchered and sent on its way: some to restaurants across Japan; some, still frozen, stuffed into styrofoam boxes and flown to New York, Sydney or Singapore.
But some, perhaps, will find its way upstairs, to the first-rate sushi joints on the fourth floor, which open just after the tuna auction ends and close by mid-morning.
One offers a tuna breakfast: a four-piece roll and six nigiri, arranged in order of fattiness, from mouth-coatingly unctuous to lean, poached-celery light crunch.
How guilty diners should feel about such pleasures is an open question.
Stocks of the once-endangered bluefin have recovered, but the threat of overfishing has not receded, and many complain that Japan is doing too little to ensure the sustainability of its catch.
Warmer seas are making fish migrate.
Mr Yamazaki says that those native to Kyushu, Japan’s southernmost big island, are turning up around Hokkaido, its northernmost, 2,000km away.
A growing share of the fish sold at Toyosu is farmed—something locals once winced at, but which now seems inevitable.
By noon the day’s action is over.
Afternoon is the market’s quiet time: the auction floors are cleaned, with pallets neatly stacked.
In the other building, accountants tally up the day’s sales before pulling down the metal shutters, going home and getting ready to do it all again tomorrow.
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