Wholesale Sushi:
Culture and Commodity in Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market- Theodore Bestor
This article essentially summarizes
the Tsukiji Market fish and
seafood trade.
Bestor writes that 60,000 people come to Tsukiji every day to buy and sell fish
to feed all of Tokyo. The crowd consists of “Retail fishmongers and
supermarket buyers, sushi chefs and box lunch makers, hotel caterers and even a
few ordinary consumers.” According to Bestor, 6 million dollars worth of fish is
exchanged at this market every year. There are 2000 varieties of seafood sold
at Tsukiji.
When the fish are auctioned, buyers use hand gestures and secret codes to
signal which fish they want to buy and how much they are willing to pay for it.
These auctions “are pivotal in the process of defining and redefining the
culturally relevant categories of commodities that are the market’s stock in
trade. These cultural processes are embedded in the auctions and the other
social institutions of the market.”
Bestor writes that transnational economic, political, and social forces have
eroded the differences between cultures and societies and this can be shown
through the fish trade. As Tsukiji serves as the central place for the global
seafood trade, sushi is spreading to the rest of the world and the rest of the
world’s
culture is now influencing Japan. Technological inventions have made
the shipping of sushi to different parts of the world much easier and have
facilitated this trade.
The Tsukiji marketplace has existed since the seventeenth century but was moved
in 1923 because the Kanto earthquake destroyed the existing village.
“Most Japanese are highly conscious of food as an element of culture and of
culture as the essential core of national identity.” But, Japanese eating
habits have changed as of late and been influenced by the West.