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TOKYO – It will be difficult to replace 83 years of dirt.
While the wholesalers of Tokyo's famous seafood wholesale market, Tsukiji, opened for the last day on their usual Saturday site, they lamented, with their customers, the end of the grunge era.
"Dirty, it's better," said Yoshitaka Moria, 38, owner of a fish shop in Tokyo's Ota district, which regularly shopped for seafood in Tsukiji and was buying an assortment of tuna, bream, oysters and amberjack on Saturday morning. "It makes this place so alive. I know fishmongers work too much to clean up. "
In the last hours of the market, considered the largest in the world for seafood, the cobbled lanes, covered with lumps, spread over an area of 24 hectares, were dipped in bloody water and banned butts mingling with fragments of bone and guts.
Over the coming week, most of Tsukiji's more than 800 stalls, which will sell 480 varieties of seafood and 270 types of fruits and vegetables, will leave their huge rusty steel frame chapel for sale. install in a new location where the city has built $ 5.3 billion fully enclosed and air-conditioned facilities.
"I feel so depressed," said Teruo Watanabe, 78, who has worked as a tuna wholesaler in Tsukiji for 60 years. "I do not like change."
Aside from a ceremony singing applauding at the end of the last Saturday tuna auction, nothing indicates that it is a normal day at the market.
Polystyrene crates filled with squid, abalone, mackerel, salmon eggs and tuna heads with gaping mouth were stacked very high. The middlemen who bought and sold here for decades sliced fish sliced on hatched wooden tables with thousands of knife nicks. Workers wearing oversized aprons and rubber waders threw live flounder on metal spring scales, shouting their weights.
By respecting hesitant pedestrians, standing drivers were weaving turret trucks into the aisles. Merchants have compiled bills of abacuses or calculators for sale when the octogenarian emperor of Japan was still in his forties.
The Tsukiji market opened in 1935, replacing a fish market in Tokyo's Nihonbashi district, destroyed in the 1923 earthquake.
Just over a mile from the center of Tokyo's glitzy Ginza shopping district, Tsukiji has become one of Tokyo's most popular tourist attractions. Visitors line up for hours to attend the daily tuna auction each morning. Wholesalers sell an average of 1,540 tonnes of seafood a day and an additional 985 tonnes of fruit and vegetables.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government began talks nearly two decades ago to transfer the wholesalers to Toyosu, about a mile away on an island in Tokyo Bay that once housed old gas. factory.
After years of delay in construction, a move was planned for 2016. But soon after Yuriko Koike was elected governor of Tokyo. She postponed the move after finding that the contaminants in the groundwater at the new site far exceeded environmental limits.
The city hired experts to carry out numerous tests and installed additional concrete floors and water pumps in Toyosu. During the summer, Ms. Koike announced that the new site was secure and scheduled the move for October.
But in the days leading up to the closure of Tsukiji on Saturday, rumors circulated among shop owners, who claimed the government had removed evidence of continued contamination. According to a survey, 80% of business owners are reluctant to move.
Mikio Wachi, 73, who has been running a tuna wholesaler for 48 years in Tsukiji, vowed not to move to Toyosu. Instead, he said, he would be transferred to another market in the Ota district of Tokyo.
Two protest posters hanging on the awning above his stand. "Relocation of Tsukiji Market: Absolutely Opposite!" While he was scraping fine tuna meat bones with a small wooden handled knife, he thought chemicals were still in the groundwater in Toyosu.
"It's like we have to spray chemicals on the fish before we sell it," he said.
Mr. Wachi's 41-year-old son, Akihiro, said that moving to Toyosu would be like opening a fish stall in Chernobyl.
"People will not buy," he said. A July poll by The Asahi Shimbun, a left-wing daily, revealed that 40 percent of Tokyo residents did not think Toyosu was safe enough.
Many pit owners feared losing customers during the move, although they mentioned higher parking fees and more difficult access.
Apart from the wholesale market, traders selling nuts, cheese, knives, beer, spices, cooking utensils and souvenirs have continued to peddle their stocks while packing cartons. Crowds lined up in sushi restaurants for hours, waiting for a last meal before the move.
Azusa Ushikubo, 45, an employee of a recruitment company who travels to Tsukiji for lunch every Saturday for 20 years, has decided to take a leap forward by closing Friday's day. She still waited three hours for lunch at Sushidai, one of the most popular restaurants on the market.
On Saturday, some Tokyoites who had never managed to travel to Tsukiji had previously made a pilgrimage for the last day.
Yumi Kondo, 46, an office worker at a passport agency, came with her 18-year-old daughter, Miyabi. At 9:30 am, they had queued for two hours at Nakaya, a sushi restaurant discovered online, and I still had at least an hour left. "The magazines indicated that there were always long queues," Ms. Kondo said. "We thought it would be worth it."
The wholesale market in Tsukiji will be shaved in the coming months and the city plans to build a transit center for buses that will be used during the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. An adjacent retail section, with restaurants of sushi and shops, will remain open to tourists. .
One of the most worrying problems is about 10,000 rats that could be unleashed during the demolition period and new construction.
Reiko Horiuchi, 39, who was visiting the market with her 9 year old son for the first time on the last day, said it was shameful to demolish it.
"There are not many places like this in Tokyo," she said. "All the rest is new. But I do not think new things are necessarily better. "
Makiko Inoue and Hisako Ueno contributed to the report,
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