Copyright 2005 National Post All Rights Reserved National Post (f/k/a The Financial Post) (Canada)
February 22, 2005 Tuesday Toronto Edition
SECTION: ARTS & LIFE; Notebook; Pg. AL1
LENGTH: 1070 words
HEADLINE: Lessons from fish out of water: An anthropologist in Tokyo's massive seafood market
BYLINE: Robert Fulford, National Post
BODY:
Namiyoke Shrine, just to the north of Tsukiji, the central fish market of Tokyo, contains stone monuments dedicated to creatures of the ocean. There's one for shrimp, one for clams, one for monkfish, one for the unusual fish used as sushi toppings. This is the kind of exotic detail that makes visitors like me fall permanently in love with Japan. Elsewhere, notably around the Mediterranean, shrines are built to honour fishermen. In Tokyo they honour fish.
The vast indoor spaces at Tsukiji (pronounced, roughly, "tsoo-kee-gee") are so huge that you can't see from one end of a market building to the other. The immensity of this enterprise arouses as much awe as the pious monuments. It's the biggest fish market in the world by a long way, its daily receipts about eight times those of Fulton Fish Market in New York. When I spent a morning at Tsukiji I felt as if I were standing at the centre of something almost unimaginably vast, a commercial network stretching to every corner of the world.
In the great sheds the most remarkable objects are the hundreds of frozen tuna, a pyramid of them looking like torpedoes waiting to be loaded onto a submarine. The temple and the auction pits, taken together, neatly summarize traditional and modern Japan. The temple speaks of gratitude before the riches of nature. The market speaks of seafood imperialism, Japan's triumphant shaping of cuisine around the world. Scores of millions of us, having grown up knowing that no sensible person would eat raw fish, now consume it regularly. That change came, more or less directly, from Tsukiji.
Theodore C. Bestor, a Harvard anthropologist, has spent the last 15 years poking around the market, asking questions, and finally writing what seems to me a classic, his fine-grained study, Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World (University of California Press).
Bestor operates within the still youngish practices of urban anthropology. Late in the 20th century many anthropologists turned away from the established tradition of scholars from rich countries studying preliterate societies.
For a variety of reasons, including guilt over exploiting the Third World as material, they began instead to study modern societies.
Old-style anthropology didn't disappear, of course. In the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute you can still read about "Value, reproduction and cosmic substance among the Napo Runa of the Ecuadorian" and in Current Anthropology you can find fresh data on "Bridewealth accumulation, sibling gender, and the propensity to participate in cattle raiding among the Kuria of Tanzania." But articles in anthropological journals are now more likely to reveal how people in the developed countries think and act. They often carry titles such as "NASCAR and transculturalism," which appeared recently in Current Anthropology.
In studying Tsukiji, Bestor tries to tease out the institutions and cultural meanings that endow the market with social identity, structural order, and historical memory. He quotes the prince of his profession, Clifford Geertz: "Man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun." Bestor lacks Geertz's ability as stylist and aphorist, but he searches for the same webs of significance, the half-secret and half-understood customs and mythologies that impose form and purpose on a place that the casual visitor might see as chaotic and improvised.
Bestor commits himself to the study of the small businesses that make up the Japanese fish trade, much as earlier anthropologists concentrated on kinship groups and marriage customs. In his account Tsukiji exhibits the qualities that many of us quicken to when we visit Tokyo. The devotion to quality and craftsmanship makes much of the Western world seem by comparison genially mediocre. An intense, urgent commercialism functions within a spirit of politeness, generosity and trust. Everyone seems anxious to work hard and play hard. Owners and workers have taught themselves codes of decency that make extreme human density not only bearable but pleasing.
On the other hand, buyers and sellers at Tsukiji are not unrealistic. Sellers and their staffs discuss prices in a code that can't be understood by any but their favoured customers. At one point Bestor visited the second-generation owner of a prosperous fish restaurant and learned that his relationships with fishmongers at various Tsukiji stalls reach back to his father's generation. Bestor obviously wanted to hear that this proved how well business works when based on a legacy of trust. Not quite. "That's not it," said the restaurant owner. "You stick with your established suppliers not because you trust them more, but because you mistrust them less."
Bestor nicely catches the drama of the auction, which begins with the sounds of bells and buzzers at 6 a.m. People have been bringing in fish since midnight and since 4 a.m. buyers (agents for stores and restaurants or individual sushi chefs) have been touring the sheds, tasting a dry sardine here, checking the colour of sea urchin roe there, sometimes cutting a tiny fragment of flesh from a frozen tuna to judge the fat content by rubbing it between their fingers. For the next 90 minutes auctioneers and bidders will be at work in the auction pits, the bidders communicating with hand gestures and a "rapid-fire mercantile slang" that Bestor finally learned to decode. Flash cameras are banned at Tsukiji because the light might make an auctioneer miss a signal, leading to calamity for the bidder and recriminations all around.
The first great fish market was set up under the shoguns several centuries ago, and in the restaurants that sprang up around it sushi was perfected in the 1820s. Yohei Hanaya, the chief inventor, lives on in the names of several Japanese restaurants, whose owners like to imply that their chefs were taught by descendants of chefs who were taught by Yohei. He devised what he called "squeezed sushi," slices of raw tuna and another fish atop neatly shaped clumps of rice.
In those days all sushi chefs were men, and much the same rule applies today. Why? Because, sushi chefs patiently explain, women's hands are appreciably warmer and might well spoil the freshness of the fish while shaping it. Not a word of truth in that, of course, but it's a controlling myth, and a useful reminder that not all webs of significance are beneficial or grounded in reality.
GRAPHIC: Black & White Photo: Agence France-Presse; Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market is the largest in the world, eight times the size of New York's Fulton Market.
