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"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.
A wholesaler cuts a tuna in Tsukiji, the famous seafood wholesale market in Tokyo, the day before it closes.Credit:New York Times
Polystyrene crates filled with squid, abalone, mackerel, salmon eggs and tuna heads with gaping mouth were stacked very high. The middlemen who have been buying and selling here slices of fish sliced on wooden hatch tables with thousands of knife-nosed people. 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 compiled the abacus or calculator bills put on 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 an earthquake in 1923.
Not far 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 auctions each morning. Wholesalers sell an average of 1,540 tons of seafood a day and an additional 985 tons of fruits and vegetables.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government began talks nearly two decades ago to move the wholesalers to Toyosu, about two kilometers away, on an island in Tokyo Bay that once housed a former gas plant.
Wholesalers and customers cross Tsukiji. On his last day, few people welcomed the prospect of an air conditioned future. Credit:New York Times
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 of the new site far exceeded the environmental limits.
The city hired experts to carry out numerous tests and installed additional concrete floors and water pumps in Toyosu. During the summer, Koike announced that the new site was secure and scheduled the move for October.
But in the days leading up to Tsukiji's closing 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.
Wholesalers, customers and tourists are concerned that new markets on the site of a former gas plant are still contaminated, despite assurances from the government.Credit:New York Times
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 the Tsukiji market: absolutely opposite!" While he was scraping fine bones of tuna flesh with brittle bones with the help of a small wooden handled knife, he claimed to believe that chemicals remained in the groundwater at Toyosu .
"It's like we have to spray chemicals on the fish before we sell it," he said.
The son of Wachi, Akihiro, 41, said that settling in Toyosu would be like opening a fish stall in Chernobyl.
"People will not buy," he said. A survey conducted in July by The Asahi Shimbun, a leftist newspaper, found that 40% of Tokyo residents did not believe 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.
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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. "Critics have said that there are always long queues," said senior Kondo. "We thought it would be worth it."
The Tsukiji wholesale market will be razed 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 and sushi 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.
New York Times
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