Bestor - Tsukiji: the fish market at the center of the world

Economic theorists, like French chefs in regard to food, have developed stylized models whose ingredients are limited by some unwritten rules. Just as traditional French cooking does not use seaweed or raw fish, so neoclassical models do not make assumptions derived from psychology, anthropology, or sociology. I disagree with any rules that limit the nature of the ingredients in economic models.

George A. Akerlof, An Economic Theorists Book of Tales (1984)

During the boom years, books about Japanese markets became commonplace: market access, market secrets, market barriers. Then, market meltdowns.

Even in the wake of Japans sustained economic downturn since the early 1990sor perhaps especially in that wakethere is much to be learned from Japanese markets: about how Japanese economic life is organized, how markets are formed out of the cultural and social stuff of everyday life in this or any other society, how economic activity is embedded in social institutions.

This is another book about a Japanese market. I cover the waterfront, exploring currents of collusion, favoritism, and inefficiency; close relationships between trade cartels and government bureaucracies; patterns of insider trading; and asymmetrical flows of information around which keiretsu vertical combinesare organized. I describe trends in marketing and in the microdifferentiation of consumption as the prosperity of the past two generations has transformed the lifestyles of most urban Japanese. I examine the dynamics of employer paternalism, the management of consensus, and the cultural underpinnings of economic and social dynamism, from techniques that samurai used for managing market behavior to the twentieth-century expansion of Japanese trade overseas. And with Japanese political and economic systems now almost endlessly adrift amid scandal, self-doubt, and stagnation, I discuss how the economic success of the 1980s has given way to the economic recession and psychological depression of Japan after the Bubble.

But this market study does not herald lessons for foreign businesspeople to apply in their own organizations. I do not tout any twelve-step programs to success in ones dealings with Japanese trade partners. Nor is it a triumphal expos of why Japanese markets dont work, why Japanese economic success was short-lived, or why Japans economic miracle was a sham to begin with. No theory Z; no enigmas of power; no five rings; no free sushi.

Instead, this is an ethnography of trade and economic institutions as they are embedded in and shaped by the cultural and social currents of Japanese life, an ethnography of how economieshow marketsare themselves created by the production and circulation of cultural and social capital as well as of goods, services, and financial assets.

I focus on a market of singular scale and scope: Tsukiji, the worlds largest marketplace for fresh and frozen seafood, which supplies Tokyos sushi chefs and homemakers alike. Located in the middle of Tokyo, only a few blocks from the Ginza shopping district, the Tsukiji marketplace is a prominent landmark of the city, well known but little understood by most Tokyoites, and also a popular and fascinating destination for foreign tourists. It is a modern market with an enormous volume of traderoughly 544 billion ($4.7 billion) worth of seafood in 2001, about 2.3 million kilograms a dayand it is also a marketplace with a venerable history dating from the early seventeenth century. Tsukiji is closely attuned to the subtleties of Japanese food culture and to the representations of national cultural identity that cloak cuisine, but this is also the market that drives the global fishing industry, from sea urchin divers in Maine to shrimp farmers in Thailand, from Japanese long-liners in the Indian Ocean to Croatian tuna ranchers in the Adriatic.