Sale of 200kg fish to restaurant in Japan comes despite campaigners’ warnings that species is heading for extinction

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

A sushi restaurant in Japan has paid US$118,000 (£80,000/AU$164,000) for a bluefin tuna at the first auction of the year at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market, despite repeated warnings that the prized fish is heading towards extinction.



Kiyoshi Kimura, president of the firm that runs the Sushi Zanmai restaurant chain, said he was “glad” to have outbid rivals in the last new year auction to be held at the 80-year-old market before it completes a troubled move to new premises later this year.

Warning over Pacific bluefin tuna stocks as Japan meeting ends in stalemate Read more

Kimura paid ¥14m for the 200kg tuna, which was caught on the northernmost tip of Japan’s main island, Honshu.

The price was three times higher than last year but much lower than the record 155.4m yen he paid in 2013 after entering a fierce bidding war with a Hong Kong restaurateur over a 222kg fish.

Tsukiji’s first auction of the year is market by inflated bids, as buyers compete for the prestige of securing the first big tuna of the year – a feat they later use to attract diners.

But marine conservation groups have warned that overfishing is threatening the survival of the Pacific bluefin, a delicacy in Japan and other parts of Asia.

Urgent action is needed, they say, to rescue the Pacific bluefin population, which in 2012 was estimated to have plummeted by 96% from unfished levels during nearly a century of overfishing.

Stocks will continue to decline “even if governments ensure existing management measures are fully implemented”, Amanda Nickson, director of global tuna conservation at the Pew Charitable Trusts, said in a statement.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fishmongers inspect bluefin tuna before the first auction of the new year at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market. Photograph: Yoshikazu Tsuno/AFP/Getty Images

About 80% of the global bluefin catch is consumed in Japan, where it is commonly served raw as sashimi and sushi. A piece of otoro – a fatty cut from the fish’s underbelly – can cost several thousand yen at high-end restaurants in Tokyo.

The popularity of Japanese food means bluefin has become more sought after by diners in other countries, notably China.

Last September, Pew warned that the Pacific bluefin was “one step closer to collapse” after tuna-fishing nations, including Japan, failed to agree to new conservation measures.

Soaring demand in China and other parts of Asia are hastening the Pacific bluefin’s demise, prompting the International Union for Conservation of Nature to move it from the “least concern” to the “vulnerable” category on its red list of threatened species in 2014.

“Given the already dire state of the population – decimated to just 4% of unfished levels – it is of particular concern that the auction price is rising again,” said Nickson.

“The international community must let the Japanese government know that additional action is needed to save this species.”

Tsukiji, the biggest fish market in the world, whose predawn auctions are a popular tourist attraction, outgrew its current premises years ago.

Its owner, the Tokyo metropolitan government, had intended to move it two decades ago to a new location a few miles to the south in Tokyo Bay.

The move has been delayed twice, though, after toxins were discovered in soil at the new location, the former site of a coal gasification plant.

Officials say the move will go ahead in November after contaminated topsoil at the site was removed and replaced with clean soil. Workers have also pumped out polluted groundwater and injected fresh water.