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JAPAN’S SELF-STYLED Tuna King has done it again – paying more than €600,000 for a single fish.
Sushi entrepreneur Kiyoshi Kimura paid top price at the first auction of the new year at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market today, bagging a prized bluefin tuna for an eye-watering 74.2 million yen (€605,900).
The head of the Sushizanmai chain is now the proud – if temporary – owner of a 212-kilogramme (467-pound) fish.
At that price, a single piece of fatty tuna sushi would cost roughly €80, or 25 times the €3.20 that Kimura charges for the product at his 51 stores across Japan.
Kimura said:
I feel it was a bit expensive, but I am happy that I was able to successfully win at auction a tuna of good shape and size.
Later in the day, Kimura and his fellow sushi chefs sliced up the giant fish with special knives resembling a Japanese sword at its main restaurant near the market, as hundreds of sushi lovers waited for a taste or two.
When asked about the auction result, Kimura said:
As always, I want to buy the best one so that our customers can have it. That’s all.
He has built his successful chain into a national brand by paying big money at Tsukiji’s first auction every year – he has now won for six straight years – essentially using the event for publicity.
He paid a record €1.7 million for a bluefin – a threatened species – at the New Year auction in 2013, outbidding a rival bidder from Hong Kong.
Last year, he faced no formidable rival and paid a bargain €111,000 for a 200kg tuna.
Publicity
The prices may seem enormous, but Kimura makes sure to get the most out of his money.
Every year, the boisterous auction, which takes place in the small hours, makes national headlines.
Decades of overfishing have seen global tuna stocks crash, leading some Western nations to call for a ban on catching endangered Atlantic bluefin tuna.
Japan consumes a large portion of the global bluefin catch, a highly prized sushi ingredient known in Japan as “kuro maguro” (black tuna) and dubbed by sushi connoisseurs as the “black diamond” because of its scarcity.
Greenpeace Japan official Kazue Komatsubara declined to comment specifically on this year’s auction.
But, she told AFP:
A huge volume of tuna on retail display could make people forget that it’s actually an endangered species.
The 2017 auction could be the last at Tsukiji, the world’s largest fish market.
It was originally supposed to move to a new location in November, but the plan was put on hold until at least late this year, over concerns about toxic contamination at the new site.
Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike said in November that the move could even be delayed until the “spring of 2018″ depending on results of health and environmental tests.
But she also held out the possibility of scrapping the relocation altogether.
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you’re codding me
No plaice for that kind of joke here.
Ok, We’ll scale it back a bit!
Yeah no sense carping on about it.
You guys are very punny
Cringe fest
You’d be an expert on that.
I’m sure she’ll have a whale of a time
@Shane Fleming: What is the porpoise of this article?
I can get a can of tuna in Tesco for about 2 euro. I think he was screwed over!
I wonder how they’ll pay for the very last one..
The last one could well come from Irish waters. I regularly see in my news feed Irish anglers that pride themselves on capturing one of these incredible giants of the ocean off the north west coast.
A glorification of the extinction of a wild species and the absurd value society places on the last carcasses of a creature wiped out by humans. Disgusting.
And tasty
Can’t believe he payed for a fish to the tuna €600,000!!!
How much for a married fish?
Fortuna?
That’s a halibut price to pay for a fish
You had one job…
Ah come on, hell of a, halibut. Yeah its a stretch but its better than going for the usual suspects
Could have bought a decent boat and fishing rod for that. Eejit.
Thousands of these fish off the west coast of Ireland every year yet because Ireland has no historic bluefin tuna fishery, the EU will not allow us to catch one single fish. Meanwhile foreign boats can fish freely for them. Donegal bay is teeming with these fish every year and could be marketed as one of the best big game fisheries in the world yet our government won’t even allow BFTs to be caught and released by sport fishermen.
Hope he had it insured..that fish looks dead to me !!
Humans are stoopid
Hope ye are all fin-ished with these fish puns.
It’s not stupid, it’s marketing. It says so in the article if people bothered to read it. He owns a restaurant chain and he gets the name of it in the media every year by doing this. This year it even went international.
He looks like the fish
He’s a cheapskate.
He’s an idiot who is encouraging the extinction of a species. But hey he’s got the biggest! It’s always about size!
@Deborah Behan:
It is fat content my dear and not size, the quicker they catch the fish the less its adrenaline will burn off the fat as the fish will basically cook itself otherwise.
Meanwhile … there are Asian families who survive on a dollar a day.
Self cooking fish.. Thanks interweb.
@Michael Lynch:
” We watch as they tow the fish backward, using the harpoon shaft to slice its engorged gills. Bluefin are endothermic—capable of producing their own heat. During the stress of capture they can become so hot they literally cook themselves, a phenomenon that buyers call “burn.” This can only be avoided by raking the freshly caught fish’s gills and bleeding it out.”
somefin smells fishy here
He’s got some Donald Trump sized hands going on right there
He needs a slap of a tuna!!!!
Fair play to him. You can’t bring money with you.
Great Headline
I bought a tuna sandwich once thinking it was chicken.had to spit the stuff out awful stuff altogther but whatever your into. I’m sure your man is delighted with his fish
That’s a whale of a price.
Im herring a lot a’trout this fish market in japan..must go next ye
Any amount of them here in our waters plenty Irish boats catching them with the herring and have to dump them over cause no quota and people starving
There’s actually people buying fish 3 times the cost of my mortgage. Ya gotta laugh!!!
No-one chipped in?
Gives me an opportunity to use my favourite saying “A fool and their money are soon parted”.
Full of Chinese mercury…
A bunch of Cheap scales
A bunch of Cheap scales yous are
Sounds like a “fishy story” to me
I’d wanna be well cooked, or you’de be left tuna….
Somefin dodgy about that
Strange nation
have your say