In the coming week, most of Tsukiji\u2019s 800-plus stalls, which sell 480 varieties of seafood and 270 types of fruits and vegetables, will be\u2026<\/b>
\nIn the coming week, most of Tsukiji\u2019s 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 \u2014 It\u2019s going to be tough to replace 83 years\u2019 worth of grime.
As the fishmongers of Tokyo\u2019s 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.
\u201cDirty is best,\u201d 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. \u201cIt makes this place so vibrant. I know that the fishmongers are working too hard to clean up.\u201d
In the waning hours of the market believed to be the world\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.
\u201cI feel so depressed,\u201d said Teruo Watanabe, 78, who has worked as a tuna wholesaler in Tsukiji for 60 years. \u201cI don\u2019t like change.\u201d
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\u2019s octogenarian emperor was still in his 40s.
The Tsukiji market opened in 1935, replacing a fish market in the Nihonbashi district of Tokyo that had been destroyed in an earthquake in 1923.
Just over half a mile from the center of Tokyo\u2019s glittery Ginza shopping district, Tsukiji has grown to be one of Tokyo\u2019s most popular tourist attractions, with visitors lining up for hours to see the daily tuna auction before 6 each morning. The wholesalers sell an average 1,540 tons of seafood a day and an additional 985 tons of fruits and vegetables.
Partly because of concerns about the market\u2019s advancing age and deteriorating infrastructure, the Tokyo metropolitan government began discussions nearly two decades ago to move the wholesalers to Toyosu, about 1 \u00bd miles away on an island in Tokyo Bay that used to house a gas plant.
After years of construction delays, a move was scheduled for 2016. But shortly after Yuriko Koike was elected governor of Tokyo, she postponed the move after it emerged that contaminants in the groundwater at the new site far exceeded environmental limits.
The city hired experts to conduct numerous tests and installed concrete floors and extra water pumps in Toyosu. Over the summer, Koike announced that the new site was safe and scheduled the move for October.
In the days before Tsukiji\u2019s closing Saturday, rumors flew among the shop owners, who said the government had suppressed evidence of continuing contamination. According to one survey, 80 percent of the business owners are reluctant to move.
Mikio Wachi, 73, who has run a tuna wholesaler for 48 years in Tsukiji, has vowed not to move to Toyosu. Instead, he said, he would transfer to another market in Ota ward in Tokyo.
Two protest posters hung on the awning above his stall. \u201cTsukiji market relocation: absolutely opposed!\u201d As he scraped fine bits of tuna meat from fragile bones with a tiny wood-handled knife, he said he believed chemicals remained in the groundwater in Toyosu.
\u201cIt is as if we were to spray chemicals on the fish before selling it,\u201d he said.
Many stall owners expressed fears that they might lose customers in the move, citing higher parking fees and more difficult access.
Outside the wholesale section of the market, merchants selling nuts, cheese, knives, beer, spices, kitchenware and souvenirs continued to hawk their inventory while packing boxes. Crowds lined up at sushi restaurants for hours, waiting to eat one final meal before the move.
Azusa Ushikubo, 45, a recruitment-company employee who has been coming to Tsukiji for lunch every Saturday for the past 20 years, decided to get a jump on the closing by coming a day early, on Friday. Still, she waited three hours for lunch at Sushidai, one of the most popular restaurants in the market.
On Saturday, some Tokyoites who had never managed to visit Tsukiji before made a pilgrimage for the final day.
Yumi Kondo, 46, who works as a clerk in a passport agency, came with her daughter, Miyabi, 18. By 9:30 a.m., they had stood in line for two hours at Nakaya, a sushi restaurant they had found online, and still had at least an hour to go. \u201cThe reviews said it always has long lines,\u201d said the senior Kondo. \u201cWe figured it would be worth it.\u201d
The Tsukiji wholesale market will be razed, and the city plans to build a transit hub for buses to be used during the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. A retail section next door, with sushi restaurants and shops, will remain open for tourists.
One of the biggest worries is an estimated 10,000 rats that could be unleashed during the wrecking period and new construction.<\/p>\n