You want to know about God? About religion? Forget the temples. Get your ass to Tsukiji at four in the morning.
The Tokyo fish market isn’t a place, it’s a living organism, a beating heart that’s been pumping lifeblood through Tokyo since before any of us were born. You roll up in the dark, jet-lagged and bleary, and suddenly you’re wide awake because you’re standing in the middle of something that makes your precious artisanal whatever-the-fuck look like a child’s tea party.
The tuna auction is a ritual older and more precise than anything you’ll find in a monastery. These fish, bluefin, mostly, some of them the size of torpedoes, they’re laid out on the concrete like offerings to some ancient sea god. And maybe that’s what they are. Each one represents miles of ocean, decades of life, the end of a journey that started in waters most of us will never see. The buyers circle them like art collectors at Christie’s, but these guys aren’t looking for a conversation piece. They’re looking at flesh, at fat content, at color and texture that will determine whether their sushi counter lives or dies.
The auctioneers bark in a language that sounds like it’s being spoken backwards at triple speed. Hands fly up. Money changes in amounts that would make you weak in the knees. A single fish can go for a hundred thousand dollars. Two hundred thousand. More. And within hours, it’ll be broken down by men whose knife skills make Wolverine look like a hack with a cleaver.
Here’s the thing nobody wants to talk about… it’s beautiful and it’s doomed.
You watch these guys work, third, fourth generation fish dealers, men who can tell you the life story of a tuna by looking at a cross-section, who know the difference between fish caught by line versus net, who can taste the ocean in the flesh, and you know you’re watching something that won’t exist in another generation. Maybe two if we’re lucky. The bluefin are disappearing. Not slowly. Not “we should probably think about this.” They’re being vacuumed out of the ocean by industrial fleets with technology that would make the Death Star jealous. And we’re here, in the middle of the night, watching the end of an ecosystem get sold to the highest bidder.
But you can’t think about that. Not at four a.m. Not when you’re watching a man in rubber boots and a headband who’s been doing this since he was a kid, who inherited this from his father who inherited it from his father. Not when you see the pride they take, the precision, the poetry of their movements as they break down a 500-pound fish into cuts so perfect they could make you cry.
The outer market is where the civilians go, stalls selling otoro and uni, little restaurants where the sushi is about six hours fresher than anything you’ll get back home. The knives on display could double as surgical instruments. You can buy dried bonito that looks like a piece of driftwood, kelp that smells like the ocean floor, fish roe in every color that shouldn’t exist in nature but does.
This is where the high-low thing collapses completely. The most expensive ingredients in the world sold next to pickled radish.
You walk through Tsukiji and you understand that we’re living in borrowed time. This abundance, this variety, this insane luxury of choice, it’s not sustainable. It never was. But for now, in the dark before dawn, surrounded by ice and salt and blood, you’re standing in a place where human skill and ocean bounty still intersect. Where tradition hasn’t been completely paved over by efficiency. Where you can still see, if you look closely enough, what we’re losing.
And it’s fucking magnificent.
