Bowermaster’s Adventures — Welcome to squid city!

by Jon Bowermaster on

For the past couple nights I’ve dreamed about being attacked by giant calamari; not the fried variety, but the long, gelatinous species, which wrap me up in big squid rings and push me into the sea. Which I’m sure has everything to do with spending the day in Hakodate, on the big island of Hokkaido, Japan’s squid capital.

The streets leading to the morning market are heavy with restaurants, each featuring an illustration of a squid on its awning, billboard or even in neon. At open-air shops, tanks of still swimming squid are surrounded by trays of squid on ice, squid wrapped tight in plastic, dried squid, hammered squid, all cut, sliced and diced. Souvenir shops feature plastic squids, squid pens, even drinking cups made from … squid. You won’t be surprised that squid have been a staple here for thousands of years.

(The biggest squid ever caught? Twenty-four feet long. The largest invertebrate on the planet, they are thought to grow to as long as sixty feet but because they live at such great depths have never been studied in the wild.)

My question for these shopkeepers and restaurant owners, of course, is: Are they at risk of taking too many squid from the sea? Long thought beyond risk of being over fished – they don’t live long anyway, are a very prolific species and fluctuate naturally – the reason they seem to be safe will surprise you.

Normally at home along the coast from Mexico to Chile they are deep-sea creatures, living at depths of 3,000 to 5,000 feet they’re increasingly being found in the colder waters off California, Canada and Alaska. Jumbo squid, six to eight feet long, are booming in areas where they have not previously boomed. The reason for the boom takes us back to Japan, especially the big market at Tuskiji in Tokyo where we were a few days before. Guess what is the main predator of squid? Blue fin tuna. Which are now being badly over fished and sold by the thousands a day in Japan’s markets.

Lots of fingers point to Japan as the greatest threat to the depletion of fish around the world. The Japanese are the world’s biggest consumer of fish; Tuskiji is like an extraordinary mortuary for global sea life. Not only do the Japanese pose a problem for other countries’ fish stocks, but also threaten the world’s fish stocks as a whole. Each day, tens of thousands of tons of marine life, clawed from rocks and scooped from oceans by factory ships working 24 hours a day, are auctioned in the early hours. Japan’s taste for seafood only appears limited by price and availability. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates Japan devours 30 percent of the world’s fresh fish, close to 170 pounds a year for each man, woman and child. Australians, by comparison, manage just 40 pounds.

Some conservationists and marine scientists are increasingly raising questions about how long Japan’s appetite can be accepted as an unquestioned cultural imperative. The constant plundering of the ocean is devastating fish stocks and destroying ecosystems. While we ponder that, there remains one good thing in the sea: There are plenty of squid … so get out the calamari recipes.

Bowermaster’s Adventures — Going Going Gone! The World’s Biggest Tuna Auction

by Jon Bowermaster on

My first glimpse of Tsukiji fish market’s big, daily tuna auction is surreal: A thousand frozen blue fin tuna – weighing between one and two hundred pounds each – laid out in symmetrical rows on a concrete floor. That first look through a scratched plastic peephole, blurring the edges of the scene, makes it evermore otherworldly.

A pair of cavernous auction rooms sit at the far back of the market. Entry to each is through eight big yellow canvas roll-down doors, each bay representing a different company. Beginning around three a.m. the big fish are laid out; an hour later buyers or their representatives – from restaurants, supermarkets and vendors within the market – arrive to begin their daily inspection. This being Japan it is all very prompt: At 5:30 the first side of the room is auctioned, at 6 the second side. By 6:15, 6:20 at the latest, tuna are being dragged out and loaded onto carts to be sent all around Tsukiji, Tokyo and cities beyond, some destined for as far away as China.

Tuna are the biggest business in the world’s biggest fish market. Japanese love their blue fin and pay dearly. The biggest and best sell for $50,000, $80,000, occasionally more than $100,000. For a single fish. Last night we visited a high-end sushi joint in the chi-chi neighborhood of Ginza, which had split the cost of this year’s traditional “first” tuna with another restaurant, on January 8th – for a 129 kilos (261 pounds) tuna they paid more than $104,000. For the next several days’ lines stretched around the block for a taste.

The tuna come to Tsukiji from all over the world; Japanese processing boats scour the Indian Ocean, Mediterranean Sea and elsewhere buying up everything they can. They are not alone. One result of this rapacious demand, according to the World Wildlife Fund, is that blue fin tuna may be wiped out in the next few years.

This morning laid out in neat rows, still wearing sheen of frost and numbered with red food die there would appear to be no worry about running out of tuna. Each fish is split along its belly and a chunk has been cut out of its side to be used as a handhold. The tail has been cut off and a circular piece of meat dangles there by a thin piece of skin. A flap of meat has been cut flayed back near the tail, which is the main spot of inspection. Apparently the back and forth motion of the tail generates lots of oil in the fish and the more oil the better.

More than one hundred buyers mill about the frozen fish, in a kind of uniform: Blue coveralls or jacket with company name in white on the chest. Rubber boots. Ball cap with official badge indicating the buyer’s number pinned to its peak. The tools of the trade are simple: A flashlight, a wooden handled metal hook for lifting and probing, a cloth or paper towel hanging from the belt for wiping off fingers and hands post probing, a tiny notebook for jotting in and a cell phone for communicating with an absent boss. My favorite shopper is tall for a Japanese and wears a green windbreaker the same color as his dyed green hair, which is swept back Elvis-style. He’s got to be in his sixties, wears thick glasses and jokes with everyone around him as he inspects.

The inspection is equivalent to the kicking of a new car’s tires. With one finger the flap of meat near where the tail used to be is lifted and a flashlight shined on the exposed meat. Sometimes the flap is held back with the wooden handled hook, the density of the meat of the meat tested with hook or simply eyeballed. If they like what they see they will whack at the meat with the metal hook, opening up the still mostly frozen tuna and then dig into it with their fingers, pulling out a red morsel which they roll in their fingers into a ball. Sometimes they take a big sniffing of the rare meat. I half expect them to pull a bottle of soy out of their pocket, juice it up and have a taste. I watch to see if they slip the meat into their pockets for later, but instead they most often drop it onto the floor, wipe their fingers on the towel hung from their belt and move onto the next fish. The biggest buyers bid on lots, buying a half-dozen at a time; some are here for an individual fish.

I’m curious about the hierarchy of the market and try to ask a couple Japanese men standing beside me. My assumption is that the auctioneers must be near the top of the heap. They say no, contending that everyone at the market – whether truck driver, fish cutter, icemaker or auctioneer – is equal. I ask who owns the market and they say they think it is three men. Which makes me wonder if it’s anything like the Fulton Fish Market in New York, which was long “administered” by the mob? One thing is clear: There are very few women and no Caucasians (“too tall,” they are told if they apply).

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At exactly 5:30 the first of the two morning auctions begins with frantic hand bell ringing by four simultaneous auctioneers, each representing a different company, each standing on a blue step stool in front of one of the bay doors. Each rings with a different fervor and pace, beginning to shout out loud as the ringing increases. With a quick doff of his ball cap – to the fish, or the spirits at large? – each is off, shouting and gesticulating, faces turning bright red, yelling what sounds to the non-Japanese ear something like, “TACO TACO TACO …. HIPPO HIPPO HIPPO … SAMPLE SAMPLE SAMPLE … TACO TACO TACO … SAPPY SAPPY SAPPY …” at the top of their lungs.

Each auctioneer has a personal style, bobbing and weaving and shouting in odd fashion, each channeling some kind of individual tuna god. My favorite is a tall man in a blue jumpsuit and brown ball cap, wearing thick glasses and a # 2 pencil stuck in a sleeve pocket. He notates madly in a little book even as his calling gets louder, more fervent, his face maroon, eyes glancing up towards the fluorescents as if he were channeling directly from the god of the sea, yet somehow registering the subtle finger lifting from buyers until calling out the Japanese equivalent of GOING … GOING … GONE. As he shouts a pair of men on either side note with pencil on paper the winning bids and then quickly mark each fish sold with a thick black magic marker.

The whole shebang lasts about ten minutes, sending several hundred fish towards cutting tables scattered around the sprawling market.

Twenty minutes later the second half of the warehouse is auctioned. I keep my eye on an individual buyer, representing a vendor inside the market. I watched him study a particular fish – at one point turning his back to it and grabbing it between his legs, I’m guessing to judge its weight? As soon as his bid was accepted he turned his ball cap around – the number on the metal plate pinned to its peak is his i.d. – he pulled out his hook, grabbed his fish and began dragging it towards the door. Using the handhold cut in its side he hoisted it onto a waiting, man-pulled cart and trailered it off into the maelstrom, on its way by day’s end to someone’s table.

Bowermaster’s Adventures — Fish Mecca

by Jon Bowermaster on

A long line of three-wheeled electric carts steered by oversized circular handlebars, each with an attached four-foot-long wooden bed, whizzes through the narrow aisles of the Tsujiki fish market. Each is steered by a wild-eyed, sometimes smiling, sometimes glaring, Japanese fish monger – one of 60,000+ employees here in the world’s largest fish market – who would just as soon mow you down as avoid you. Balanced precariously on the back of each are a three hundred pound frozen tuna or a tall stack of Styrofoam boxes filled with fish or crushed ice or twenty, three-foot long, just-sawed swordfish steaks.

It’s just after six in the morning and the place has been alive for several hours, though it never really shuts down. The morning’s biggest event – the auction of hundreds of big blue fin tuna – has just finished and its results are being delivered one-by-one to many of the 900 individual stalls in the open-air market. Sunrise pouring through the dust-covered skylights of the 74-year-old market mixes with the fluorescents that light up each small shop, crammed side by side and fronted by tables heavily laden with Styrofoam containers filled with just-dead fish of more than four hundred species and tanks and plastic bags filled with those still swimming.

The Tsujiki (skee-gee) fish market – more officially the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market – is Mecca for fish purveyors and sushi lovers alike. (The more general name is appropriate since under the same roof there are big produce and flower auctions as well … though it’s hard to compare the excitement of bidding for bell peppers with that of this year’s biggest tuna to date, 261 pounds.) For several mornings we’ve gotten up before four a.m. and woken a taxi driver slumbering in his own front seat in order to be here the moment the tuna auction allows its first visitors in. Alex and I have a particular curiosity because over the years we’ve filmed big tuna in the wild and in farms that were ultimately headed here. Seeing them lined up on the floor – frozen, de-tailed and numbered with red food coloring — means we’ve followed them nearly full circle. Our morning sushi-break at 8:30 means we will have truly followed them through the entirely of their lives.

If you care about the health of the world’s ocean and its decreasing abundance of fish, you have to be fascinated by this place for both its size and the economy it creates. Jobs here are highly sought, whether as cart drivers, salesmen, cutters, icemakers, deliverymen, auctioneers or buyers (the emphasis on men is purposeful: of the 60,000-plus workers a tiny handful are women; only a very few work the floor, most are accountants). An American living in Tokyo tells us he is trying desperately to get a job in the market, in part because it pays well and in part because he would be such an oddity. “They will only tell me I’m ‘too tall,’ ” he says, “but what they are really saying is that I’m ‘too white.’ “Each year more than 700,000 metric tons of seafood is sold beneath the market’s roof, roughly $5.5 billion worth.

Walking the narrow aisles among the nine hundred small vendors it’s easy to see how we’ve done such a good job at decimating fish stocks around the world; of course it’s not just the Japanese who are doing so, but they have a per capita consumption of fish far outstripping the rest of the world. Though the market sits on the Tokyo Harbor, virtually all of the fish arrives by truck, some from Japan, most from seas thousands of miles from here.

There are two distinct sections of the market: The “inner market” (jonai shijo) is the licensed wholesale market, where the auctions and most of the processing of the fish take place, and where licensed wholesale dealers operate small stalls. The “outer market” (jogai shijo) is a mixture of wholesale and retail shops selling kitchen tools, restaurant supplies, groceries and seafood, and narrow restaurants, especially sushi restaurants. On our first morning we choose to have breakfast alongside the rubber-booted workers, rather than wait in the long lines of tourists outside the most popular sushi shops, on pork steaks, cabbage and rice.

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The market handles more than four hundred different types of seafood from tiny sardines to six hundred pound tuna, from cheap seaweed to the most expensive caviar. On one counter a live squid is gutted in front of us, its ink squirting everywhere; next-door band saws cut through just-thawing tuna; at the end of the aisle the most popular man in the market – the ice man – lugs fifty-pound blocks of ice to a conveyor which carries it to its crushing. Just beyond the market’s door rises a mountain of Styrofoam boxes being picked over by representatives of all the stalls inside; if still intact the boxes are reused, if cracked or broken they are fed by conveyor into a crusher to be recycled into paving bricks.

The history of the market goes back a century. In August 1918, following the so-called “Rice Riots” (Kome Soudou), which broke out in over one hundred cities and towns in protest against food shortages and the speculative practices of wholesalers, the Japanese government was forced to create new institutions for the distribution of foodstuffs, especially in urban areas. A Central Wholesale Market Law was established in March 1923. The Great Kantō earthquake on September 1, 1923, devastated much of central Tokyo, including the Nihonbashi fish market. In the aftermath of the earthquake, the market was relocated to the Tsukiji district, completed in 1935.

At a neat stall on the backside of the market a trio of men labor over six foot long swordfish, cutting them down to steaks. The master cutter – armed with extremely long, extremely sharp knives – operates on a hydraulic table, which he raises and lowers with his foot. Fresh water runs from a hose washing blood into a drain (amazingly, the whole market smells very … clean … no fish smell at all). With rapid, elegant cuts along its spine he splits it in two and then quarters each side. His partner reduces them to steaks, wraps them in paper towels and plastic and stacks them to be distributed.

I ask if they think there will come a day when we take the last fish from the sea. I’m only partially joking, and translating my question is tricky. But they get the point. Everyone I’ve talked with in the market admits the fish they’re selling today are far smaller than ten years ago; we’ve taken all of the biggest fish already.

“It’s not like cows or chickens,” says the man cutting steaks. “You can’t simply grow more. We never know exactly what’s in the sea, do we? But when these species are gone, I believe there will be more to take their place. I think my job is very secure!”

Bowermaster’s Adventures — Swine Flu and Tokyo

by Jon Bowermaster on

The direct flight from New York to Tokyo is one of the longest, thirteen hours and forty-five minutes, looping across Canada and the Bering Sea before paralleling Kamchatka and the eastern islands of Japan. It’s a long way to travel for humans and viruses alike … though I have to admit I hadn’t thought about the latter until we touched down at Narita International Airport and found among the departure cards we needed to fill out included one labeled “contagion.”

Alex Nicks and I have come to spend a few days filming tuna auctions at Tsujiki, the world’s largest fish market – all under one open air roof are sold four hundred different fish species (700,000 tons sold each year, taking in $5.5 billion a year) and employing 60,000-65,000 wholesalers, accountants, auctioneers, company officials and distributors. The next few days promise to be fun and wild, thanks to the constant whir of all those people focused on the matter at end: selling and buying big fish.

But when we land at Narita, even before we could stand and stretch after the long flight, the plane was boarded by a dozen Japanese men and women cloaked in blue surgical gowns, caps and masks. We were instructed to stay in our seats as one of the insurgents, carrying a portable thermographic imaging gun to detect fevers, pointed in our faces, clicked the trigger and quickly assessed whether or not we were swine flu carriers. As the besmocked team moved aisle by aisle through the plane one of the stewardesses whispered that they recently quarantined eight passengers who arrived on a Northwest flight “for five days.” While I have no idea what that encompasses – locking them in a small airport room, sliding sushi and water under the door? – I’m certainly hoping it doesn’t happen to us.
They are clearly looking for symptoms of flu, including coughs and colds. A week ago three Japanese were quarantined upon arrival in Tokyo after testing positive in preliminary checks. They were a high school teacher in his 40s and two teenage boys who had been on a school trip to Canada where they visited Ontario on a home stay program with about 30 other students, taking part in various programs hosted by a local high school in the town of Oakville. They were isolated upon arrival, on April 24, and are still recovering at a hospital near the airport.

Looking down the aisle as the blue-gowned, therm-armed team does its job I wonder if that’s our fate too? A couple days ago thirty-seven passengers and two flight attendants on an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles were detained overnight for similar reasons. They were released after tests revealed that an ill passenger was not contaminated with the new H1N1 influenza A strain, or swine flu.

Cleared after one hour, they gave each of us our very own face mask and sent us on our way. When we finally arrived in downtown Tokyo I spot random individuals on the street wearing white surgical masks. Taxi drivers, worker bees on lunch break. One thing I note is that it’s different here than in China, where many of the half billion city dwellers wear masks every day to keep away heavy airborne particulates created by coal burning, auto exhaust and general, everyday pollution of the air.

In Japan, as neat and orderly a country as you can find, it appears they are concerned only about swine flu. Stopping into a drugstore I ask the manager how the sales of masks are going and he says “about 50 percent higher than usual and we are running out …. If this keeps up, it’s going to be a very, very good year.” I think he was talking about his pharmacy’s bottom line.

Bowermaster’s Adventures — Zanzibar

by Jon Bowermaster on

After the Perfume River in Hoi An and the souks of Marrakech, Zanzibar rounds out the trio of ‘most-exotic’ places on the globe that I’ve long wanted to spend not days, but weeks. While these are very real places – crowded, often hot, occasionally dirty – they have each set themselves up in my mind, mostly through books, as mysterious, romantic. Now I’ve officially spent time in each.

Walking the tight streets of Stone Town, the centuries-old market on Unguja, the main island of Zanzibar, the place lives up to the reputation built in my mind. The earliest visitors here were Arab traders who are said to have arrived in the 8th century; pirates swarmed its coastline beginning five to six hundred years ago. I walk into its earliest building, the mosque at Kizimkazi, which dates back to 1107. Hints of its human influences – Assyrians, Sumerians, Egyptians, Phoenicians, Indians, Chinese, Persians, Portuguese, Omani Arabs, Dutch and English – are visible everywhere. Some, particularly the Shirazi Persians and Omani Arabs, stayed to settle and rule. With this influence, Zanzibar has become predominantly Islamic (97%) – the remaining 3% is made up of Christians, Hindus and Sikhs.

For centuries the Arabs sailed with the Monsoon winds from Oman to trade primarily in ivory, slaves and spices. The two main islands, Unguja and Pemba, provided an ideal base for the Omani Arabs, being relatively small, and therefore fairly easy to defend. From here it was possible for them to control 1,000 miles of the mainland coast from present day Mozambique to Somalia. Most of the wealth lay in the hands of the Arab community, who were the main landowners, kept themselves to themselves, and generally did not intermarry with the Africans.

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This was not true of the Shirazi Persians who came from the Middle East to settle on the East African coast. The story goes that in AD 975, Abi Ben Sultan Hasan of Shiraz in Persia (now Iran) had a terrible nightmare in which a rat devoured the foundations of his house. He took this as an omen that his community was to be devastated. Others in the Shiraz Court ridiculed the notion, but Sultan Hasan, his family and some followers obviously took it very seriously because they decided to migrate. They set out in seven dhows into the Indian Ocean but were caught in a huge storm and separated. Thus, landfalls were made at seven different places along the East African coast, one of which was Zanzibar, and settlements began.

Widespread intermarriage between Shirazis and Africans gave rise to a coastal community with distinctive features, and a language derived in part from Arabic, which became known as Swahili. The name Swahili comes from the Arab word sawahil, which means ‘coast’. The Zanzibar descendants of this group were not greatly involved in the lucrative slave, spice and ivory trades. Instead, they immersed themselves mainly in agriculture and fishing. Those Shirazis that did not intermarry retained their identity as a separate group.

This day we get lost in the narrow market streets, modern-day stores selling much of the same factory-made “antiques” to a booming tourist crowd, and emerge in the real Zanzibar, a sprawling open-air market. Even in the late afternoon as the sun begins to disappear on a hot, hot day it is packed with people weighing fruits and vegetables, eyeing shell fish and giant jack’s, for the home table.

It’s a beautiful end to a first day on the so-called spice island; from here, its north, into the heart of what is increasingly becoming “the pirate’s sea.” So … stay tuned!

Read more from Jon at Bowermaster’s Adventures.