The
Fisher King
By: Yuki Allyson Honjo
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.
Most
importantly, the ideas that underpin and organize Bestor’s book
are unique as a piece of economic anthropology. Modern Tsukiji and
the place it occupies as a commercial and cultural hub in Japan’s
capital seems strange at first as a subject for an anthropologist.
As Bestor points out, anthropologists are imagined either as Margaret
Mead or Indiana Jones, studying exotic tribes and complex dowry
arrangements. Many express “incredulity when I tell Americans that
I study contemporary Japanese economic institutions.” (Bestor p.12)
But as Bestor points out:
"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
Like
many ex-pats in Tokyo, I have played the role of a dutiful host
and took visitors to Tsukiji early in the morning. It is the perfect
thing to do with jet-lagged guests. In weak light, steam rises
over giant flash frozen tuna carcasses, men wield sword-like knives,
buckets of squirming un-identified seafood slosh about. The noise
level is ineffable with mechanized carts speeding down narrow
alleyways and mountains of Styrofoam packing boxes and men shouting
orders and commands. Everyone appears to be in hurry. Whereever
you are, the market the size of a several aircraft hangers looks
and feels like total pandemonium. Yet, Bestor manages to make
sense of this cacophony and chaos and methodically takes us through
the relationships that organize the market.
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.
| Every
Tsukiji dealer in imported fish has his favorite horror
story about the improper handling of fish by foreign producers
and brokers. . .One salmon dealer, for example, recounted
with dismay his visit to an Alaskan fishing port where
salmon were being unloaded by crew members wielding pitchforks,
rendering the lacerated fish worthless in Japan. He went
to show me how even the size and placement of the external
scar would make a difference. A scar running lengthwise
along a salmon (parallel to the spine) would make the
fish unsalable as a fillet; on the other hand, a fish
scarred at right angles could be salvaged because it could
be cut into sliced or salmon steaks, and portion with
the damaged skin simply discarded. (Bestor p. 147)
|
While externally
scarring does not affect taste or nutrition content, clearly it
affects the fish’s ability to command a high price.
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.
