In the coming week, most of Tsukiji’s 800-plus stalls, which sell 480 varieties of seafood and 270 types of fruits and vegetables, will be…
In the coming week, most of Tsukiji’s 800-plus stalls, which sell 480 varieties of seafood and 270 types of fruits and vegetables, will be moving to a new $5.3 billion facility.
TOKYO — It’s going to be tough to replace 83 years’ worth of grime.
As the fishmongers of Tokyo’s famed wholesale seafood market, Tsukiji, opened for their final day at their familiar site Saturday, they and their customers lamented the end of an era of grunge.
“Dirty is best,” said Yoshitaka Moria, 38, an owner of a fish shop in the Ota ward of Tokyo, who regularly shops for seafood at Tsukiji and was buying an assortment of tuna, sea bream, oysters and amberjack Saturday morning. “It makes this place so vibrant. I know that the fishmongers are working too hard to clean up.”
In the waning hours of the market believed to be the world’s largest for seafood, the lumpy cobblestone alleys, sprawled across 57 acres, were soaked in bloodied water, and forbidden cigarette butts mingled with fragments of bone and guts.
In the coming week, most of Tsukiji’s 800-plus stalls, which sell 480 varieties of seafood and 270 types of fruits and vegetables, will be moving out from under an enormous rusted steel-frame canopy to a new location where the city has built a $5.3 billion fully enclosed, air-conditioned facility.
“I feel so depressed,” said Teruo Watanabe, 78, who has worked as a tuna wholesaler in Tsukiji for 60 years. “I don’t like change.”
Aside from a ceremonial clapping chant at the end of the final tuna auction Saturday, there was little sign that it was anything other than a normal day at the market.
Styrofoam crates filled with squid, abalone, mackerel, salmon roe and gaping-mouthed tuna heads were stacked high. Middlemen who have bought and sold here for decades sliced slabs of fish on wooden tables crosshatched with thousands of knife nicks. Workers clad in oversize aprons and rubber waders tossed live flounder onto metal spring scales, shouting out their weights.
Honking at hesitant pedestrians, standing drivers wove forklifts in and out of the aisles. Merchants tabulated invoices on abacuses or calculators that went on sale when Japan’s octogenarian emperor was still in his 40s.
