Tokyo Cut Out Its Ocean Heart for the Olympics
The loss of the old Tsukiji Fish Market is a national tragedy
Tokyo, you have cut out your ocean heart as we in New York have cut out ours. You should have taken a moment to pause before you demolished a market with a long and illustrious past. You should have paused and considered the ocean and the fishermen who harvest its treasures and the difficult future they are facing.
These thoughts drifted up in my mind as I watched a dispirited Olympics, devoid of crowds and sound-tracked by automated cheers. They came to me after a decade of looking into the troubled history of fisheries in my own country. My home city of Manhattan has lost both its world class fish market and much of its local fishing fleet. We are poorer because of it. And now Japan is too.
I first came to know about New York’s version of Tsukiji a little over a decade ago when I moved to the far southern end of the island of Manhattan. On the first morning in my new home I rose early and set out to explore the neighborhood. Just past Water Street the feel of the neighborhood started to change and the ghost of a former incarnation started to reveal itself. Finally I reached a metal warehouse built during the 1930s. Weeping with water stains, it bore a straightforward, working person’s declaration of purpose on…
