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GLOBALIZATION AT WORK ]I

Went Global

A 500-pound tuna is caught off the

coast of New England or Spain,

flown thousands of miles to Tokyo,

sold for tens of thousands of dollars to

Japanese buyers. . . and sh+ped to

cheji in New York and Hong Kbng?

That's the manic logic ofglobal

sushi. I By Theodore C. Bestor

40-minute drive from Bath, Maine,
down a winding two-lane highway,
the last mile on a dirt road, a ram-
shackle wooden fish pier stands
beside an empty parking lot. At 6:00 p.m. nothing Tuna rolls. A worker speeds slabs of tuna through Tokyo's Tsukiji fish
much is happening. Three bluefin tuna sit in a huge
tub of ice on the loading dock. cellphone and get the morning prices from Tokyo's
Between 6:45 and 7:00, the parking lot fills up with Tsukiji market-the fishing industry's answer to Wall
cars and trucks with license plates from New Jersey, Street-where the daily tuna auctions have just con-
New York, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and cluded. The buyers look over the tuna one last time and
Maine. Twenty tuna buyers clamber out, half of them give written bids to the dock manager, who passes the
Japanese. The three bluefin, ranging from 270 to 610 top bid for each fish to the crew that landed it.
pounds, are winched out of the tub, and buyers crowd The auction bids are secret. Each bid is examined
around them, extracting tiny core samples to examine anxiously by a cluster of young men, some with a
their color, fingering the flesh to assess the fat content, father or uncle looking on to give advice, others with
sizing up the curve of the body. a young woman and a couple of toddlers trying to see
After about 20 minutes of eyeing the goods, many Daddy's fish. Fragments of concerned conversation
of the buyers return to their trucks to call Japan by float above the parking lot: "That's all?" "Couldn't
we do better if we shipped it ourselves?" "Yeah, but
Theodore C. Bestor is professor of anthropology and associ- my pickup needs a new transmission now!" After a
ate director of the East Asia Program at Cornell University. few minutes, deals are closed and the fish are quickly