Saying food is fuel for the body is like saying sex is for procreation. While not strictly incorrect, it does manage to entirely miss the point.

What we chose to eat and why we choose to eat it is not just a reflection of hunger, but of tastes informed by our senses, culture, and a market that provides our desires. Theodore C. Bestor’s Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World explores these complex relationships within the context of Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market and the resulting volume is easily one the best books recently published on Japan. While it is a scholarly book, it is engaging and approachable for the general reader (it even contains a tourist guide to Tsukiji in the back)—this is the way good books are meant to be. Meticulously researched and referenced, this sprawling and ambitious ethnography is the result of over ten years of observation and research.

"Yet corporations, cartels, and markets should be as much interest to anthropologists as communities, clans, matrilineages. The critical issues of organizing social relations around production, commodification, exchange, and consumption—activities that determine ownership, distribute surpluses, legitimate property rights, and structure access to common resources—are no less anthropological significance than the study of a moiety." (Bestor p. 13)

After all, while Tsukiji is a Japanese food market in Tokyo, it is “. . .no more or less culturally or socially embedded than any other complex economic institution in any other society.” In short, Tsukiji is a sort of case study in which we can gain a greater understanding of how culture can influence the pattern of economic activity and the institutions that buttress it.

Fish Story

First, a few facts and figures: Tsukiji is the world’s largest marketplace for fresh, frozen, and processed seafood. 50,000 people a day, mostly wholesalers for the retail and restaurants sector, come to Tsukiji to shop from the 1677 stalls which covers 56 acres. Over the year, the market sells two thousand varieties of seafood. In 1996, 627 m kg of seafood and an estimated $5.7bn USD changed hands (Click here for a JRN analysis, "Fish and Rice in the Japanese Diet"). Tsukiji deals with 15% of the annual tonnage of fresh and frozen seafood products that go through Japan’s 54 wholesale markets (Bestor p. 19).

In my latest visit to Tsukiji, I made it to the tuna auctions that occur at about 6AM. Before the auction, the buyers inspect the fish, which are labeled with an auction markings and provenance (For JRN auction photos, click here.) Men cluster around an auctioneer and with a few moments of incomprehensible crying (Tsukiji operates English-style auctions with the price moving from low to high), a flurry of hand gestures, and the auction was concluded. After the auction the 200 kg fish are dragged away. We watched as one tuna remained on the floor: no one bid on it. After the auction, the auctioneer appeared to be trying to negotiate a price to move the fish. The buyers looked at cut in the narrow tail stalk, sliced tiny slivers of red flesh from the frozen fish, rubbed them between the fingers and thumbs, shook their heads, and walked away. The fish, through my eyes as a gawking tourist, looked exactly the same as its neighbor.

But the fish was judged by the market and deemed not as worthy as it its neighbor. Bestor observes that market places are venues where traders “differentiate and validate shades of quality from which chefs and their clients can draw satisfaction of knowing they are connoisseurs.” The auction clearly is a mechanism that differentiated each fish—some fetched a high price, others a low one. And there was something clearly undesirable about the fish that was not sold. But as non specialists, we didn’t have a clue what differentiated it from its brethren: Disease? Fat content? Worms? Stained meat? An unusually ugly fish?

I won’t have the opportunity to find out because as of May 2005, tourists, unfortunately, are no longer allowed to attend the tuna auctions, although tourists are allowed into the market itself. The tuna auction area is now roped-off to keep tourists away from the fish and the crying.

Bestor suggests that a myriad of complex mechanisms are in play in this marketplace. While in the strictest sense Tsukiji is a market in which invisible hand pushes along actors to truck and barter along the lines of economic principles, Bestor points out what makes one fish desirable over another is steeped in culture. While we might be tempted to think of fish as commodities, the reality is far more complex: one bucket of fish is not the same as the other. For example, Bestor discusses the idea of “kata” in which the fish’s outward appearance must be perfect, as the slightest outward blemish may signal imperfection within (Bestor p. 146). Joy Hendry discusses a similar concept of “wrapping” in her books as sign of ritual and hygienic purity. (Click here for a JRN review of Hendry's The Orient Strikes Back.) Similarly, the fish must be externally perfect and meet “Tsukiji specs,” something that non-Japanese suppliers do not always appreciate.

Connoisseurship also plays a role in pricing. For example, Japanese line caught fish are prized more than foreign farmed fish. Being able to judge the subtle grades of fish (and being able pay the bill for such an experience) is also part of the game. Glancing over the New York Times Dining and Wine section, they boldly proclaim “Japanese is the new French” (NYT, Jan. 7, 2004): “Japanese cooking in New York now is where French cooking was in the mid-1970's: on the verge of a major breakthrough in quality and authenticity.” Equally many column inches are expended on the nuances of sushi at Manhattan’s most desirable tables; clearly this obsession with “authenticity” and “connoisseurship” is finding a global audience.

But what is authentic Japanese food? Food culture, like national culture, is not a pre-ordained or immutable phenomenon (Bestor p. 126). Like nations, food culture develops along imagined national cuisines around often equally imagined national traits. Just as rugged individualism and meat on the grill is seen as a trait essential to American identity, Japanese imagine a national cuisine along the lines of certain traits: rice and seafood.

This description brings to mind the quintessential Japanese food: sushi. Sushi as we think of it in the West—vinegared rice, some wasabi and a sliver of fish, is called Edomae (literally “in front of Edo”) or nigiri (“hand molded”) sushi. Japanese and foreigners alike think of it as traditional Japanese food, but in fact the dish has a relatively shallow history and only dates back to the mid-nineteenth century (Bestor p. 141). Sushi in its original form was probably closer to funa-zushi, in which fish is fermented through its contact with rice. With funa-zushi, however, the rice is discarded. Sushi’s present incarnations was apparently started by a chef by the name of Hanaya Yotei (1799-1858), who invented the fish and rice dish in his shop in Ryogoku in Tokyo. But the name Edomae sushi in itself is, in fact, a bit of a misnomer. Bestor points out that currently there is premium placed on “Edomae” foods—specialties that are supposedly caught in the waters of Edo Bay. However, he also points out that seafood in Edo Bay is scarce and most of it is severely polluted.

Today, fat marbled tuna belly (o-toro) may be considered as the height of luxury as a sushi topping in Japan. However, Bestor notes that it was not popular until the advent of mechanical refrigeration in the mid-twentieth century: in fact, it was given away as cat food in Japan (Bestor p. 142). In my hometown on Cape Cod, before the advent of global sushi, tuna fishermen used to use toro as lobster bait. The rest of the fish were used for tuna steaks on the grill or were sent to canneries. Now, wise to the global demand for the silky, slightly sweet meat, the fish are left whole and flash frozen, sold to the highest bidder. Fish caught off the coast of my home town may have made the long journey and to go to auction in Tsukiji. Or be sold by the local fishmongers as “sushi grade fish” for Cape Codders to enjoy—quite a transformation for what was once was a bucket of bait or cat food.

The love of food, at least from personal experience, verges on the irrational and is difficult to explain in words. How do you describe the perfect piece of Cornish Yarg cheese? Why are we willing to pay so much more for a plate of dry aged steak? Or Japanese matsutake? Our tastes are loaded with cultural baggage, which in turn affects pricing. And as Bestor shows us in Tsukiji, both the rational and irrational forces are in play in the fish market. “To be sure, buy low and sell high is always good formalist advice. But buy from whom? Sell to whom? When? Where?” Bestor successfully shows us that Tsukiji stands at the nexus of culture, economics, and institutional arrangements. “The social structure of Tsukiji’s institutions and the cultural logic of the transactions are the centrally defining elements of the marketplace as an economic mechanism, a social institution, and a cultural site. They make Tsukiji a marketplace, not a spot market.” (Bestor p. 306). And while the market place faces an uncertain future with its move to a new site in Toyosu (possibly in 2012 or 2013), the market will clearly survive in some form, as it constantly recreates itself, through the industry and relationships of its people.