Pacific Salmon for the Japanese

Nobody eats as much Pacific salmon as the Japanese, who consume the fish raw, pickled, baked, salted, fried, smoked and put in soup. They eat salmon liver, and salmon skulls, and they process the fish into burgers and sausage. They eat 300,000 tons of the fish each year, a third of the world’s total catch. The center of it all is Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, the largest on earth. Long before sunrise, the market is buzzing. Hundreds of men and women rush around between stalls, shout orders at one another, slice fish, work the telephones, and joke under bright strings of lights that shine down on acres of iced-down fish steaks, shark fillets, and thick red slabs of tuna stacked like wood. The concrete floors are newly washed and swept. The whole place smells fresh, like the sea.