Metropolis has an excerpt from Harvard University anthropologist Ted Bestor, who has a new book out on Tsukiji.
Each night a huge volume of seafood (roughly 2,300 metric tons) arrives at Tsukiji, coming in tens of thousands of individual consignments ranging in size from entire truckloads of frozen tuna (each fish weighing a hundred kilograms or more) to three or four small crates of fish eggs, light enough to be hefted with one hand. Every shipment consigned to Tsukiji represents a separate chain of commercial transactions between one or another of the thousands of producers and consignors who regularly supply the marketplace and one or another of the seven Tsukiji auction houses that handle seafood. The job of matching shipment to recipient and properly conveying invoices from trucker to receiving auction house is a mammoth one…
Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World [metropolis.japantoday.com]
