Look at this magnificent bastard suspended in mid-flight, caught between the ocean’s memory and some salaryman’s 3 AM craving. This is Tsukiji at 4 in the morning, when Tokyo’s still half-drunk and the only religion that matters is the one written in fish blood on concrete floors.
This icon of a tuna didn’t just die, it’s flying, one last airborne fuck-you before the auction block, before the knives, before it becomes another transaction in a city built on transactions. This is the real deal, the screaming heart of capitalism at its most honest, no spin, no marketing department, just raw tonnage of ocean meeting raw human need.
Tsukiji isn’t precious. It’s not a museum or a photo op, though tourists stumble through at dawn with their cameras. It’s men in rubber boots wielding blades like warriors, moving hundreds of pounds of flesh with the efficiency of assembly-line poetry, fast, tight, no wasted motion. The market smells like brine and ambition, where fortunes are made on weight and shimmer, where a single bluefin can cost more than your car. That is if you have a really nice car.
That flying tuna captures everything: grace, violence, commerce, mortality. The space between ocean and endpoint. Pure Tokyo. Pure everything. I think I’ve managed to catch what Kierkegaard warned against: actually seeing something instead of just gaping at existence.
People commonly travel the world over to see rivers and mountains, new stars, garish birds, freak fish, grotesque breeds of human; they fall into an animal stupor that gapes at existence and they think they have seen something.
Soren Kierkegaard, 1843