Tuna sells for $1.8M in first Tokyo auction of 2020 | Hacker News Reader

Tuna sells for $1.8M in first Tokyo auction of 2020

reuters.com

74 pointshhs46 comments

Kiyoshi Kimura wins the auction every years then sells the tuna at regular price at his chain of restaurants (~200 yens per sushi). Who won the biggest tuna of the first auction is said to receive good luck for the upcoming year.

Actually surprised its still news since he's been doing it so long and its always him. Its just a publicity stunt for his restaurants at this point.

It's still a nice gesture.

That's US$650 for 100g. ~$32 for one Nigiri, so more like $50-$80 at a restaurant per piece, and only the belly meat fetches such high prices. Who on earth eats this?

On a more serious note, won't the high price only encourage fisheries to violate their quotas and drive Bluefin to extinction?

Maybe it's like with art. It's used as money loundering.

how can you launder money if you can’t resell the fish?

I think the user suggests that the money never change owner, it just becomes laundered.

For example. If you get money in some illegal way and need to launder it. You can use it as a "customer" at your own coffee house and pay a ridiculous amount for a latte. The money then goes to the bank and become laundered.

That is how money laundering work afaik.

Cash-based businesses tend to be under higher scrutiny for money laundering. For example, a laundry mat may also have its water bills audited etc. to make sure their costs correspond with their income.

Laundering money at scale is actually a pretty big nuisance, unless you have and evil bank like HSBC to assist you [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Money_laundering_(2003,_2...

> laundry mat

Not to be that guy, but it's laundromat.

>>Laundering money at scale is actually a pretty big nuisance

A nuisance but not one that will stop criminal enterprises which tend to have extremely high profit margins.

Society gives up a lot freedom in the quest to stop illicit cash from circulating. It necessarily requires making all financial transactions subject to formulaic 'suspicious transaction' reporting requirements, which is a form of warrantless mass-surveillance.

Plus, good restaurants want to serve fresh tuna so most of it would have to be cut up and served that day. So the demand must be there, somehow.

Or, maybe this is an expensive marketing stunt. The guy who bought the big tuna is the owner of a chain of moderately priced conveyor-belt sushi restaurants; hard to imagine he’s pushing $60 nigiri through them. He does say that he might’ve gone a bit over (https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/05/asia/giant-tuna-sets-record-a... he was expecting to pay $300-500K USD.

Paying 3-6 times as much as you intend to pay for something isn't 'a bit over'. Impulse buy? Bidding war and unable to see clearly? Or simply so rich that it doesn't matter?

Possibly still a reasonable buy for him even at 3-6x what was expected if the higher price generates enough extra press coverage.

Haven't seen a single mention of his restaurant chain in the news though. The CNN article even mentions a competitor restaurant, but not his!

Well TBF, the Reuters article mentions this one though.

I think the tuna is already frozen when they buy it.

It is all flash frozen when caught

Actually not the case. You don't want to serve tuna fresh. It is usually frozen and kept that way for at least a few days to age it and give it flavor.

Well at minus 96% in numbers Bluefin could already be called extinct. at least nearly extinct.

And it isn't the only tuna species extremely near extinction. I believe one should think about the personal necessity of consuming this species.

The Pacific Bluefin is only listed as Vulnerable while the Atlantic is Endangered.

It may seem like exaggerating will encourage more action, but my experience is it just causes people to tune out.

To answer both questions, IIRC it's more of a symbolic (and probably marketing related) thing, not really reflective of market prices.

According to the high bidder he does it on purpose to generate marketing and good luck

> In Japan, paying more than half a million dollars on a single fish is considered good luck for business (and also comes with a round of free publicity).

https://qz.com/878980/a-japanese-sushi-chain-owner-just-boug...

The real marketing geniuses are the fishmongers then.

> On a more serious note, won't the high price only encourage fisheries to violate their quotas and drive Bluefin to extinction?

Yes, it's a basic flaw in the free market.

I would say it's rather descibed by tragedy of commons:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

> That's US$650 for 100g. ~$32 for one Nigiri, so more like $50-$80 at a restaurant per piece, and only the belly meat fetches such high prices.

It's a PR move more than anything. How much press does this get the buyer and the market as whole? A lot more than he paid for the tuna.

> On a more serious note, won't the high price only encourage fisheries to violate their quotas and drive Bluefin to extinction?

It's a once in a year publicity stunt. They don't pay record prices every day. But yes, if bluefin or any resource brought in record prices every day, it would certainly entice unscruplous people to cheat which would lead even the honest people to cheat - tragedy of the commons.

Business travelers with expense accounts.

> won't the high price only encourage fisheries to violate their quotas and drive Bluefin to extinction?

Yes, will add a lot of pressure to the population (that eventually will be crushed).

I find it a real shame that they replaced Tsukiji. I found it very charming. The new market is a bit sterile in comparison.

We spent a long layover in Tsukiji. Loved it! Had the best sushi of my life in a literal hole in the wall at 2am. Very charming indeed.

I should clarify that the holes in the wall (outer market) are still there. You may still visit them. But you were also able sometimes to enter the inner market, the big curved warehouse, where the actual fish market is, and that has been moved to Toyosu.

No offense but probably a placebo effect? Sushi is fine there but the restaurants were always a bit of a tourist trap. Best sushi in the city is not there.

I won't argue where the "best" sushi is, but have you tried shutoku honten? It's pretty great.

Don’t think so, it was flat out just great without any pretentious nonsense. Never had fish that fresh. Hard to find that combo in the USA, let alone on an alley at 2am.

It's amazing how this keeps generating something news worthy. As I understand it it is entirely symbolic and not really something that carries the described value?

maybe he just bought an ad, running on a gazillion newspapers, TV stations and websites?

It keeps getting clicks, so they’ll keep writing it every year.

The worldwide pacific bluefin tuna population is extinct in a 97%. I hope they choke with the last specimens alive in the planet.

Maybe is the cynical in me. Dunno, but is not possible even to try to save an endangered species with this kind of publicitary stunts (that should be illegallised many years ago IMHO. Is not much different than offering a million dollars reward for the head of the last tiger). When the people involved on those are presented almost as an hero, we are doomed to lose the species forever.

We have exactly the same problem with Atlantic Salmon in Spain. Big money. Everybody wants to cash the last one remaining, and they will do

How does the buyer make any profit at such a price? Or is just some rich person buying it for themselves?

> which translates into a price of about 700,000 yen per kilogram.

I imagine a piece of sashimi is about 1oz/30g, so you get 33 pieces per kilogram.

700,000 / 33 = 21,212

Which is about $200 a piece.

I'll be more conservative and say a piece of sushi will only use 0.5oz of fish, so we're down to $100 a piece...

Which does seem a bit unreasonable when you consider how many you need to sell (a few people will pay $1000 for a set course, but not many...). I'm also not taking into account that there's no way the entire fish can be sold at $200/oz (bones, lower quality cuts, organs).

The only other factor I can think of is that you're getting a serious bit of advertisement for your store/chain. I imagine a lot of people are going to come to the buyer's restaurants to get to eat a bit of the second most expensive tuna.

Am I doing the math wrong? I'd also love to get an expert's analysis.

The purchaser is an executive at a large sushi chain- the purchase is for marketing/media attention, not for direct profit.

it was purchased by the owner of a successful chain of sushi restaurants. soo... im guessing it gets resold.

I just did some rough math and assuming you can use the whole 608 pounds, and assuming a piece of sashimi is half an ounce, you’d need to make 90-something dollars per piece just to get your money back. Once you add on the overhead and profit for running a fancy restaurant, it seems like you’d need to be able to sell a piece of sashimi for something like $200 a piece... which seems like quite a bit too much even for the very highest end restaurants... but I don’t have first hand experience with those.

It seems like a status or marketing play

Works. I want to go there now.

He doesn't. It's entirely advertising to get his name in the news.

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