I hate the olympics. It's a huge waste of money and resources and robs the taxpayers. Wish we could just always have it in Greece or something rather than moving it every time.
Case in point: Tokyo Olympic budget is now 6x what they originally announced, and is currently expected to ring in at $15Billion (assuming exchange rate of 120 Yen to the dollar).
They will almost certainly be unprofitable.
Seems almost like a handout to general contractors =/. (There's already been a scandal with the logo having been a "hand out" to a designer)
As a Londoner who did the last set of Olympics I don't think I could disagree with you more. Sure some things changed and we lost a few places to 2012; but on the whole we gained so much more. Maybe we got lucky through politics, but I don't think many people in London would like to have the Stratford and East end we had prior to the Olympics back.
Hopefully 2020 works out well for Japan, but I don't think you can write off the Olympics all together. The UK gained so much out of them, if at a minimum we took a huge amount of nation pride forward which is probably worth the cost alone.
It's the same story everywhere, and it has a lot to do with city growth. These markets are still central to their cities and deliveries are now by HGVs which cannot fit the spaces easily. The roads around cannot take the congestion of vans and re-deliveries, and the land itself now has a very different (much higher) value if used for a different purpose.
Tsukiji is fascinating, but also a bit sad. After visiting there I am amazed that there are any fish left in the sea. The scale of the place is truly mind-boggling. I kept imagining a sign hanging over the door that said, "All hope abandon ye fish who enter here."
But the sushi in the nearby restaurants was the best I've ever had before or since.
For those who are curious, Sushi Dai is considered hands down the best sushi place inside the Tsukiji market. However, the wait is typically 4+ hours. If you get in line even before the first trains, the wait can be as short as 90 minutes. Anything shorter than that is blind luck.
Daiwa Sushi is typically considered second. Lines are typically around 45 minutes long.
To be honest, to most Western mouth the difference between Sushi Dai and any random joint in the same area is negligible. We had delicious sushi at 8 in the morning in another place, and it was still the best I've ever had (and I tried my fair share of sushi joints in London and Paris, as well as Tokyo and Kyoto).
Honestly, if you are in Tokyo for a short period, it doesn't make sense to waste 6 hours in a queue for sushi, go elsewhere.
The sushi my brother and I had across the street from the market was one of the best things I've ever eaten at all. My brother got real serious afterward, gave me a hug, and thanked me for sharing such a great meal with him. That's how good the sushi is there.
Yeah, the place I went was inside the market and was only open for breakfast. It was tiny, had maybe 8 seats at a counter. I know almost no Japanese. A lady sat me and the chef on the other side of the counter put sushi in front of me until I said I was full. The lady promptly dumped me out of my seat so someone from the line outside could come in and eat.
I'm not even sure of 1/2 the stuff I ate, but it was all delicious.
Slightly off topic, but Tsukiji is also home to my favorite Kaiseki restaurant. It's not in the market itself, but it's an amazing experience. It's a typical 3 hour or so experience, the chef is conversational, interesting, and fluent in English. The presentation is on par with other Kaiseki restaurants I've been to, but the consistency of amazing food across every course was unmatched.
I just went to Tsukiji on the opening day of this new year. As the article states, this is the last year of the 70+ year history of the Tsukiji market.
If you can read it, this document <http://www.shijou.metro.tokyo.jp/pdf/book/book_all.pdf> by the city government, who owns the market, covers the context, motivations, and efforts that had gone into the migration of the fish market from Tsukiji to Toyosu.
I was originally skeptical why it couldn't be re-developed in its current site. After all, many more ambitious redevelopment projects have been successfully done in Tokyo. For example, Shibuya station, which is used by more than two million people every day, has been going through a major redevelopment. The same with freeways in Boston aka "Big Dig." Granted, these projects take long time and is a major annoyance, nonetheless it proves that massive redevelopment projects are possible.
The document I mentioned earlier gives a nice short overview of why it is not so for Tsukiji. The main arguments are:
* Redevelopment needs a temporary on-site space but Tsukiji is so overcrowded at this point that this is not possible
* Unlike users of train stations, users of Tsukiji (food, fish, trucks, and cars) aren't very compatible with multi story buildings, yet the site is too small to have a flat single story building, which is why they feel the need to move in the first place.
* The government wants to build a closed walled building for the new market. In contrast, today the market has just the roof and no walls, and it's indeed not very clean (at least for the Japanese standard.)
In reference to the soil contamination problem mentioned in the economist article, the government apparently replaced the top 15 feet worth of soil for 40ha, which had cost whopping half a billion dollars (!)
I'd be curious to read a similar comprehensive argument from those who oppose the migration.
My personal anecdote from Tsukiji was one of the auctions. There were a bunch of tuna, I think some frozen some not, layed out on the ground, a guy comes up and puts a small plastic crate on the ground and stands on it and begins the auction. The thing that struck me was the rythm it was exactly the same as the auctioneers used in my home of England in cattle/sheep auctions. Even if you didn't speak the language, as soon as you heard it you knew exactly what it was.
A short (12') film I made in 2006 after a 3.30 am visit to the Tsukiji tuna auction - such access would be impossible now. (The whole thing is pretty amazing, but the auction at the end is absolutely mesmerizing) https://vimeo.com/8982166
My Japanese is fairly fluent, but the guy around 08:00 is pretty much totally incomprehensible...
The later dude at 10:00 seems to be announcing lot numbers ("16-ban"), doing the auction in ten-thousands ("75" for 75,000 yen?) and then announcing the winner ("Ebisuuuuu!") before going to the next.
Wow, that sucks. Wandering around Tsukiji was one of my favorite experiences of being in Tokyo some years ago. If you have the chance to go before it closes, I urge you to do so.
It's a bit sad but makes a lot of sense. Tsukiji is
incredibly haphazard and dirty by modern Japanese standards. And it's not like the area lacks for authentic fishing destinations.
(The author is Dave Arnold, the host of Cooking Issues and operator of the Booker and Dax bar in NYC; Nastassia works for him, and Mark Ladner is the A-list chef-operator of Del Posto.)
Many Tsukiji romanticists don't realize just how centrally located the current market is. It's a ten-minute walk, literally just one kilometer away from the Ginza, which is the most expensive real estate in Tokyo:
Zoom out to get some additional perspective. So aside from being a tourist attraction, it doesn't make any sense for the market to be there. The new market, in Toyosu, is closer to expressways and the sea, and even has a (currently very quiet) train station ready waiting for the day it opens:
I highly recommend that anyone who has yet been able to make it to the Tsukiji fish market does so before its demise later this year. It's a truly incredible place, and the Sushi holes there are the most incredible fish you'll eat anywhere in the world.
I have not have a meal that was better than the 15min Omakase Sushi meal I ate there at 5am after an hour of lining up.
I was lucky enough to do a sushi workshop tour of Tsujiki on the auction day (auction itself was closed to tourists). It was incredibly cramped and hectic, but has a lot of charm. I'm not surprised moving it has little support, it will uproot or kill many local businesses servicing the area for generations. Definitely worth visiting if you can before then.
From an outsider's perspective, Japan seems to have a very strong grip on their cultural history. I can understand why they have resisted relocating the market, and why they will mourn its destruction.
On the other hand, they seem to be facing a number of crises involving the nation's youth, who seem to be growing increasingly detached from responsibility and ambition [1]. In the article they talk about how doggedly old-fashioned the market's purveyors are, eschewing computers in favor of paper and pencil. I know there are significant differences between Japan and Western cultures, but I'm pretty sure their youth crave technology and progress as much as does our own.
Again, this is all through a fairly Western lens, but if there were a large, aging building in my area that the city wanted to relocate in order to build new businesses and services, I would be much more excited at the prospective new opportunities than I would be upset at the potential cultural loss.
> but if there were a large, aging building in my area that the city wanted to relocate in order to build new businesses and services
But Tsukiji's not an "aging building"; it's a bustling, energetic neighborhood. It's the biggest fish market in the world. They sell any kind of fish or seafood you can think of, and those you can't dream of, also. Some of the best sushi restaurants in Japan are in the area (Sushi Dai, for one). It's a marvel of efficiency and economy - specialized transport carts with zero turning radii, etc.
I'd be sad if my city wanted to move one of its biggest markets, dealing with a food culture absolutely integral to my country's history, to a contaminated toxic site, because it wanted to create a temporary press site & traffic artery for a temporary sports event.
But of course, it's the other way around; giant events like the Olympics or the World Cup are political opportunities for megaprojects/infrastructure to be pushed through under the excuse of being a host city. Most probably, the Tokyo city government has been wanting to move the Tsukiji market for a while, and the Olympics is a great excuse under which to do so.
The building is aging, that's partly why they're relocating the market, which will continue to operate. The article makes several colorful comments about the state of literal decay it's in:
> Tsukiji is creaking at the seams
> leaky roof
> bumpy floors
> An earthquake could bring the roof down.
They spent a decade cleaning up the prospective new site, which hopefully means it's no longer contaminated. I'm sure the city understands the value of keeping fish clean and safe, especially considering their habit of eating so much of it basically raw.
In addition, the building is too small to support the needs of the city and the businesses within. One apparent objective of the new site is to accommodate the growing needs of the fish market, which should be a net success for the area's customers.
The only objective negative I can think of is that the logistics of transporting the product from the market to the various local businesses might need to change significantly, but if the city's infrastructure is good enough to handle those needs then it shouldn't be a lasting problem.
I was staying near Tsukiji market while in Japan. Sadly never got around to visiting the auctions, but when I was walking around the market I noticed that it's literally next to Ginza neighborhood with lots of highrise offices. If the market is gone, the land on which it was located would be very valuable indeed. Proximity to upscale district and plenty of waterfront property. It's really not a place where a sprawling fish market should be.
> If the market is gone, the land on which it was located would be very valuable indeed. Proximity to upscale district and plenty of waterfront property. It's really not a place where a sprawling fish market should be.
Land valuation is based off of the revenue the land generates, plain and simple. The 'value of a land' is thus an index of the real estate market, and does not involve any positive (or negative) externalities involved in considering the use of land, density of land, mix of programs of land, etc.
At times, it may be important to support and privilege land uses that don't maximally contribute to revenue but contribute to other land that contribute to revenue.
To use the metaphor of food consumption, it would be like assuming that the value of food lies in the energy that it provides to the body, so drinking water is pointless because water has zero calories. Indeed, like a body, cities are metabolic entities.
The notion that urban planning decisions need to be based off of (short-term) market-based valuation misses the potential to invest in long-term positive externalities. Infrastructure is not something that can be effectively funded by a market, because markets lack a proper valuation criterion.
So - the land on which Tsukiji is located is very valuable inded. And Toyosu, where it's going, is actually pretty close. But "moving the fish market will create valuable land for Ginza's overpriced highrise offices" is a short-term strategy, plain and simple; in this case, perhaps it's one that makes sense.
the nation's youth, who seem to be growing increasingly detached from responsibility and ambition
I can see why - they're not stupid. They see a future of absurd amounts of unpaid overtime, pitiful salaries, long commutes, additional hardship if they choose to have children and an inflexible culture controlled by grey old men.
From the Wiki you linked to: young people falling into this category were framed as lazy, work-shy and voluntarily out of employment. This media portrayal was effective in arousing the concern of Japan's (conservative) middle aged population, but it led only to moderate support for new youth policies.
To paraphrase Max Planck, progress happens one funeral at a time.
I wasn't implying that becoming a salaryman is the only option. Take each thing I listed as a grab-bag of options, with the exception of the country and culture being moderated by grey old men -- which is absolute.
> In the article they talk about how doggedly old-fashioned the market's purveyors are, eschewing computers in favor of paper and pencil.
There is a lot of professionals that are strongly anti-bullshit/shiny toys and live and breathe no-nonsense.
These purveyors will all have decent cell phones, deal with mail and electronic communication where it makes sense, and use the most tried and true, bullet proof tools where money is on the line.
For now, if you are auctionning standing in a room with prices that fly by at every moment, computers are not the relevant tool. Same if you're taking orders while talking to someone with hands soaked in icy water.
Pencil and paper are still the fastest and most reliable media depending on what you are doing.
PS: interestingly NEETs sometime seem to be another kind of way to refuse bullshit. Some of the younger generations feel that working or participating to the society has no sense, they're predestined to be cannon fodder. And they're not completely wrong in some cases, even if they fail to see potential alternative paths. When there seem to be no way forward, some will just stop, instead of blindly following the path as their parents did.
> For now, if you are auctionning standing in a room with prices that fly by at every moment, computers are not the relevant tool. Same if you're taking orders while talking to someone with hands soaked in icy water.
Pencil and paper are still the fastest and most reliable media depending on what you are doing.
Reminds me of a story I saw about fairly modern aircraft carriers still using a model of the flight deck and colored nuts to designate what was going on down on the deck itself.
Will Tsukiji remain in full operation until the shutdown date in November, or is it going to wind down? I'm planning on visiting Japan for the first time in Sep/Oct and was hoping to see it in full swing.
