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Comment by bogomipz | Hacker News Reader

>"Tsukiji is the most exalted fish market on earth, the sort of humbling place that causes the likes of globally worshipped god-chef René Redzepi to deem it one of the “seven culinary wonders of the world.”

What a cringe-worthy sentence that is. Also what a load of crap that sentence is. I'm guessing the writer has never actually been. Tsukiji is a wholesale fish market. Its smelly, cold and wet with lots of flash frozen fish sitting on warehouse pallets. Just like what you would expect a wholesale fish market to be. It just happens to be in Tokyo.

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I highly disagree. I have visited many times, and I find it to be a truly magical place. The mind-boggling variety of life from the sea, the frenetic energy, and the tuna auctioned for tens of thousands of dollars - it made an indelible impression on me.

>"I highly disagree. I have visited many times, and I find it to be a truly magical place."

I am curious how many other fish markets have you been to?

Mexico City and New York City have similar scale fish markets with just as many varieties and with just as much commerce. I'm guessing someone like Anthony Bourdain or some other TV food celebrity put Tsukiji on the tourist map and so now people feel compelled to see something special in it.

And I honestly can't understand why anyone would get up before dawn to go to a 5:30AM fish auction if they didn't work in the business and understood Japanese.

> And I honestly can't understand why anyone would get up before dawn to go to a 5:30AM fish auction if they didn't work in the business and understood Japanese.

You know why. Hipsters do it for bragging rights.

Or you know it's actually an interesting experience. Have you done it?

IT's not really that interesting, and you have to get in line around 2AM for it.

Better to go around 11 right after the tourist rush.

Yes, I have done it. Not for bragging rights, just because I wanted to see what it was about. Far from being impressed.

I'd have to beg to differ.

As someone who is passionate about food, cooking and in particular, japanese cuisine - going to Tsukiji was really an amazing experience.

Learning first hand from a wholesaler about the daily process of acquiring stock which they go on to sell was fascinating. It's really astounding that people are going there every morning and inspecting ~1000 tuna for a mere few seconds, inspecting only by colour and occasionally the fattiness of the tissue in their fingers. These split second assessments then lead to them making a ballpark valuation of the stock which they take with them to auction - the decisions affecting their livelihood.

If you have had the opportunity to sample sushi from across the spectrum of quality - you'll know full well that there is good sushi and bad sushi. Considering sushi is something like 7 ingredients (rice, mirin, soy sauce, sugar, fish, vinegar, wasabi) the execution of the dish and the quality of the ingredients are absolutely key. Being able to go to the heart of where everything begins is really quite exciting.

> If you have had the opportunity to sample sushi from across the spectrum of quality - you'll know full well that there is good sushi and bad sushi.

I eat sushi often, and I have been to good and bad places alike. But as a sushi amateur, I don't really grasp the passion of Japanese for tuna - it's not even a fish they used to have in the first place in Japan, most of it is not fresh and is just imported from the Mediterranean, and to my tongue tuna (and I tried about every part of it) is nothing I crave for. I enjoy a LOT more the local fishes they have in Japan. Again, it's probably just me, but I find tuna utterly boring in mouth.

> the decisions affecting their livelihood.

Not really. Plenty of bad sushi joints stay afloat for years and do not lack customers. I have even eaten at famous places near Tsukiji and I have found it to be OK, but nothing at a spectacular level despite their reputation.

Guess we'll just have to agree to disagree - perhaps it's simply a matter of different interests as I get pretty excited going to butcheries and equally found Smithfields and Billingsgate (in London) pretty exciting. So maybe I'm just a food nerd.

>Not really. Plenty of bad sushi joints stay afloat for years and do not lack customers. I have even eaten at famous places near Tsukiji and I have found it to be OK, but nothing at a spectacular level despite their reputation.

I'm not convinced your observation is really a valid response to what you've highlighted. If your professional reputation revolved around buying and wholesaling tuna, it naturally follows that your livelihood depends on the decisions you make when you buy your stock. Maybe when you make a bad purchase you can recoup some of the losses by selling to one of the bad sushi joints that you mention, but you have still lost time and probably margin. You may have also disappointed customers who may have been depending on your usual quality stock. So for me, having any first hand insight into the nuance of another person's way of life in interesting and made the visit to Tsukiji a worthwhile experience.

Getting up once late at night is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, even if only to cross off a (hypothetically bad) experience.

Tsukijo was a tourist hotspot with people doing that before the word "hipster" became a thing.

Hipsters existed before there was a word for them?

It's a matter of personal preference whether anyone enjoys a visit to a fish market like Tsukiji. That's entirely separate from its commercial and cultural significance. You mentioned NYC has a similar scale to Tsukiji market - I don't think that's true. Although Fulton Fish Market is the world's second largest and the most important in the US, it handles about 200M pounds of fish annually vs Tsukiji's 1.6B pounds. Tsukiji handles almost an order of magnitude more fish. When you start diving into the diversity and quality of product available, they aren't even comparable. Japan eats about 10% of the world's catch. Tsukiji is the Silicon Valley of seafood. Network effects and supply and demand mean Japan has more access to higher quality product than anywhere else in the world. Whether seeing a dead fish on ice is interesting or not is up to you.

I went for the last time probably 7-8 years ago, before I had ever seen any TV coverage of it, so my opinion is my own, and not biased by some Food Network star. When I went, there was no line to stand in, in fact you could walk freely among the tuna before the auction started (on my last visit, they were just starting to put procedures in place to keep people from taking selfies with the fish).

On my visits, I roamed around for hours, entirely unmolested, just keeping an eye out for the funny little electric carts driving everywhere which threaten to mow down unsuspecting tourists.

Most fish markets in Japan are like that. Tsukiji is just bigger. Actually it's dirty there and it's in a poorly maintained area of Tokyo that was never made for that in the first place. The fish market in Sapporo is much, much nicer.

The one in Sapporo is a tourist trap.

Oh so you think Tsukiji with its "authentic" sushi joints operated by Koreans and Chinese is not a tourist trap?

>the tuna auctioned for tens of thousands of dollars

I'm not sure that the trade in endangered species is anything to get excited about.

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