A bluefin tuna was sold this Thursday for 36 million yen (about 256 thousand euros) in the traditional first auction of the year at the Toyosu fish market in Tokyo.
The price for the 212 kilograms of fish was more than double the amount reached last year for a bluefin tuna (about 17 million yen, or 121,000 euros) and is the sixth highest ever paid in Tokyo’s main wholesale market, from the start of data collection. in 1999.
Tokyo-based wholesaler Yamayuki and the Ginza Onodera group, which owns a chain of Michelin-starred sushi restaurants with outlets in the Japanese capital and branches in China and the United States, made the largest combined bid for the tuna.
The fish was caught in waters near Oma, off the coast of Aomori in northern Japan, where experts say the best sushi fish in the world is caught.
“I wanted to generate a positive message now that the pandemic [da Covid-19] it is weakening. The price is ideal for the first auction of the year,” Yamayuki president Yukitaka Yamaguchi was quoted as saying by Japan’s Kyodo news agency.
The tuna sales record in the first auction of the year continues to be set in 2019, in which a bluefin tuna sold for more than 333 million yen (about 2.3 million euros). At the time, this was the first auction to be held in Toyosu, after the fish market was moved in 2018 from the famous Tsukiji in central Tokyo, at the end of a controversial 17-year process.
For the last 15 years, the first auction of the year has been fetching astronomical prices for the best pieces because many see it as an opportunity to generate enormous media attention in obtaining a product considered “hatsumono”, or the first of the time. , highly valued. by the Japanese consumer.
Source: TSF
