It quickly became clear that there weren’t any wandering around on the street. The seafood restaurant around the corner from the hotel was closed and, in any case, turned out to specialize in minke whale sashimi, not lobster. There was, therefore, only one place to go: the mother of all seafood bazaars, the Tsukiji Wholesale Fish Market.
Japanese eat a lot of fish – 11.3 million tons of it each year – and almost all of it passes through Tsukiji, making it far and away the largest fish market in the world. Starting around midnight every day save Wednesday, some 16,000 trucks and vans converge on the cavernous market from every fishing port in Japan, plus the Tokyo and Osaka airports, where airliners from around the world arrive bearing live, fresh, and frozen sea creatures from Maine and other far-flung the corners of the Earth. By noon, when the market closes, some 2,300 tons of seafood will have changed hands, six times the volume of the Fulton Fish Market in New York. Certainly somewhere amidst that mountain of seafood, there would be a tank of Maine’s most famous crustaceans.
It wasn’t going to be an easy task. Tsukiji is a sprawling 56-acre complex on the Tokyo waterfront, and the cavernous main building is so enormous that I couldn’t see from one end of it to the other. The entrance was guarded by a swarm of refrigerated trucks, ready to run down or back over the inattentive pedestrian. Beyond, obscured by a frozen mist rising from packing ice, was a warren of over a thousand stalls stretching into the gloom. Mechanized carts, their beds laden with seafood totes, whizzed down the passages between the stalls, pushing aside an ocean of sushi chefs and fish retailers perusing the aisles.
Hopping over puddles of blackened water, I plunged into the fray.
It seemed like every sea creature I’d ever heard of was on display, and quite a few I hadn’t. Fishmongers were cutting into the flash frozen bodies of tunas, which were stacked all about and looked like torpedoes. Live eels sloshed about in barrels beside trays of pale squid, reddish-purple octopus, and clams of Jurassic proportions. Neat steaks of familiar Atlantic salmon chilled beside a tub of bizarre, brick-red fish with top-mounted antennae and catfish-like heads. In some places the aisles were nearly choked off by stacks of Styrofoam coolers containing a full range of silvery fish, from Baltic herring to Pacific mackerel.
Collectively, Tsukiji’s fishmongers hawk nearly 500 species, from whales and tuna to urchins and sea cucumbers. Their patrons — the restaurateurs and shop owners of Tokyo — sometimes have relationships with particular stall-keepers that are reckoned in generations. Harvard anthropologist Theodore Bestor, author of Tsukiji: The Fish Market at the Center of the World, asked a second-generation restaurateur if these long connections represented a legacy of trust. “That’s not it,” the man told him. “You stick with your established suppliers not because you trust them more, but because you mistrust them less.”
The buyers distribute the fish throughout greater Tokyo, keeping 22 million people in sushi, sashimi, fish balls and dried, salted fish snacks made from whole inch-long fish. (The latter are eaten by hand, out of plastic packages as if they were potato chips.) Some buyers don’t have far to go: the market is surrounded by a halo of snack bars, sushi counters and open-air retail shops. These retailers have one-stop shopping: all the rice and vegetables they could ever need are sold in Tsukiji’s “small” market hall, which is the size of a large aircraft hanger.
While Japanese have been eating salted minnows and urchin gonads for centuries, the American lobster is still a novelty. Japanese housewives fear contact with these unfamiliar creatures and, in any case, rarely have pots large enough to steam them in, according to the U.S. Commercial Service in Tokyo. Most of the 3,000 tons of American lobster that are imported here each year wind up being served at international hotels or Red Lobster, which has 42 restaurants in greater Tokyo.
It’s a long ride for the lobsters. From Maine, most are trucked to JFK airport outside New York, because Bangor and Boston lack direct flights to Japan. Thirteen hours later they touch down in Osaka or Narita, pass customs and are whisked down to Tsukiji in central Tokyo in refrigerated vans. I’d seen one of the latter parked outside the market, from Tokyo’s Ebisho Company that, oddly enough, claims to carry “the World’s Finest Lobster.” An Homarus Americanus was emblazoned on the side of the truck, bright red and ready to eat.
They had to be around here somewhere.
Finally, deep within the crush of living humanity and newly dead fish, I spotted them: three dozen live American lobsters lolling about in an open topped green tank. Antennas standing at attention, they looked like they’d handled the trans-Pacific flight better than I had; they were, in any case, a good deal calmer than the strange shrimp-like creatures on display around them, each flailing around in its own box of sawdust. Finally, I’d found some fellow Mainers to commiserate with.
But when I leaned in for a closer look I realized I was out of luck. Each and every one bore yellow rubber bands around its claws proclaiming their true identity: “Product of Canada.”
Colin Woodard is the author of The Lobster Coast: Rebels, Rusticators, and the Struggle for a Forgotten Frontier and Ocean’s End: Travels Through Endangered Seas. He lives in Portland and has a website at www.colinwoodard.com.