num_pages: 412
description: Located only blocks from Tokyo's glittering Ginza Tsukijithe world's largest marketplace for seafoodis a prominent landmark well known but little understood by most a supplier for countless fishmongers and sushi chefs and a popular and fascinating destination for foreign tourists. Early every morning the worlds of hi-tech and pre-tech trade noisily converge as tens of thousands of tons of seafood from every ocean of the world quickly change hands in Tsukiji's auctions and in the marketplace's hundreds of tiny stalls. In this absorbing firsthand study Theodore C. Bestorwho has spent a dozen years doing fieldwork at fish markets and fishing ports in Japan North America Korea and Europeexplains the complex social institutions that organize Tsukiji's auctions and the supply lines leading to and from them and illuminates trends of Japan's economic growth changes in distribution and consumption and the increasing globalization of the seafood trade. As he brings to life the sights and sounds of the marketplace he reveals Tsukiji's rich internal culture its place in Japanese cuisine and the mercantile traditions that have shaped the marketplace since the early seventeenth century.
language: English
title: Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World
publisher: University of California Press