Over the weekend I was in Tokyo and on Saturday went back to the Tsukiji Fish Market as I hadn't been there the last few visits after previously always making it a part of each Tokyo trip. For those who haven't visited, it's the largest fish market in the world and a bit beyond description for the scale and activity, but I'm always left with the impression that the planet's oceans have been entirely fished out considering the immense amount of seafood there. The interest of visiting it this trip was mainly because it will relocate in a couple years and modernity will remove a lot of it's current appeal.
As it relates to this website, the seafood auctions of Japan still function using open outcry and hand signals so it was nice to be back amongst a chaotic 'trading floor.' Now my enthusiasm didn't go as far as to act like the bee girl in the Blind Melon video, but it's probably the only place outside of the futures trading pits to have groups of guys wearing trading badges (on top of baseball caps) and using open outcry hand signals to transact, so I do find it pretty cool.
The tuna auction is the main attraction at Tsukiji and from what I've witnessed, it moves from tuna to tuna laying on the floor, not as shown above using tiered platforms like a trading pit which (I believe) is only used for special auctions like the first fish of the year. Trading badges are restricted in number to stallholders and various wholesalers much like seats were (and kinda still are in some respects) on financial exchanges. Hand signals used at Tsukiji are described along with a very indepth explaination of the auction processes in Theodore Bestor's book Tsukiji. Vegetables are also auctioned using the same process and you can see how it's done in some of the following video links.
Video links:
Standard Tsukiji Fish Market tuna auction
First tuna auction of the year at Tsukiji 2009
Tsukiji vegetable market
Trader in Kyoto explaining hand signals used at that market
Tsukiji sea urchin market
Kumamoto wholesale market
Kyoto vegetable market
Busan (South Korea) market
