The Journal of Japanese Studies

Anthropological monographs do not usually include instructions for a tourist visitor to the field. The new book by Theodore Bestor, Harvard professor of anthropology and Japanese studies, does so, and this clearly says something about the particular qualities of Tsukiji, the famous Tokyo fish market, as a field site. Tsukiji does little purposively to attract tourists, but mostly it tolerates them, and they flock there to see the tuna and the several hundred other varieties of catches from near and far away and to try the absolutely fresh sushi. The practical instructions Bestor offers the tourist also allow a concrete sense of the everyday (preferably early morning) scene: watch out for carts! Backpacks, large handbags, and elaborate camera bags will get in other people's way and make it awkward for you to maneuver. Flash photography around the auctions is prohibited, because the flash can momentarily blind an auctioneer to the bidding! Wear long pants and solid shoes with good nonskid soles, not sandals or open-toed shoes. Puddles are everywhere!

All those points and more, however, are in an appendix to the volume. Like Tsukiji market itself, the book has a complex structure, and readers may be tempted to enter it at different points, depending on their interests. A study of Tsukiji surely has the potential of attracting a very diverse readership: scholars of Tokyo history and ethnography, researchers in comparative institutional economics, fans of Japanese cuisine, students of globalization or of occupational cultures, urban explorers. Bestor offers much for all of these, yet his engaging style of writing will probably also keep each of them from ever getting bored, even as the tour turns out to be comprehensive. The book is also well illustrated, by way of photographs, drawings, maps, and diagrams.

In its present location, the Tsukiji seafood market dates back to 1923, when its predecessor in Nihonbashi, with a history going back well into the Tokugawa period, was destroyed by the great Kanto earthquake and the fires that followed immediately after. Through Nihonbashi, the cultural traditions of Tsukiji are linked with the old shitamachi, plebeian, artisanal, and trading Tokyo. Yet the physical area, beginning only as the marshy lowlands of the Sumida River delta were filled in during preceding centuries, also has another history: at the outset of the Meiji era, Tsukiji became the site of the first foreign settlement in Tokyo, lasting for about a generation. One could [End Page 428] argue, consequently, that in its strands of history it has already combined the intensely local with the dramatically cosmopolitan which now meet in the Tsukiji seafood trade. While Japanese coastal waters contain some 2,000 species of fish and several hundred species of shellfish, most of which have also become part of Japanese cuisine, Bestor notes that a very large part of the goods sold at Tsukiji arrives, chilled or frozen, in Japan by way of Narita Airport, from just about everywhere in the world. And then through the institutional order of Tsukiji, it is divided, subdivided, and moved rapidly and expertly from the large-scale—and, in considerable part, long-distance—trade into the local commerce which finally brings it to the tables of Tokyo fishmongers, restaurateurs, and housewives.

Each day (except Sundays and assorted holidays) some 50,000 people are involved in buying and selling at Tsukiji. Obviously they are slotted, on both sides, into a highly differentiated and stratified structure. At the top, among the sellers in the local structure, are seven large auction houses, some of them linked to Japan's famous large business combines, the keiretsu; a few even now have histories going back to the old Nihonbashi market. Auctioneers work for them. Below them are the much more numerous intermediate wholesalers, who buy their merchandise at the daily auctions and resell it at their Tsukiji stalls to customers involved in retail business. But there are also licensed buyers, making purchases on behalf of large...