One of Japan’s great institutions makes way for a car park

LAST Saturday at six in the morning the handbells rang and auctioneers launched with guttural chanting into the last auction of bluefin tuna at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market. The next day the market closed for ever. A procession of its distinctive “turret trucks”—miniature flat-beds driven by standing drivers—made their way from Tsukiji, on the edge of the earthy Shitamachi or Lower Town, a historically working-class area, to Toyosu, a joyless landfill in Tokyo Bay. Tsukiji, the greatest fish market on Earth, is gone.

Built in the 1930s, it was a model of functional modernism. Fish and seafood were brought from the quay via auctions and wholesalers in curved rows of warehouses through to end-buyers. City officials had long claimed that the market was no longer fit for purpose. The buildings were old. A big earthquake posed risks, not least of the release of asbestos from crumbling walls. And the site was unhygienic. Tokyoites are on alert for an exodus of sashimi-starved rats from the disused buildings.

But there is no getting around it. To close Tsukiji is to kill something vital. As a great sushi master, Hachiro Mizutani, once told Banyan, Tsukiji is “not just Tokyo’s best known brand. It’s the people’s market.” Its 23 hectares sat at the heart of the world’s seafood trade, dealing on a typical day with 1,500 tonnes of fish and seafood—450 species in all.

The human connections were many and varied, too. The economy of the marketplace was etched across the neighbourhood in complex social, cultural and ritual patterns. Over 60,000 people made a living in or around Tsukiji as auctioneers, stevedores, clerks, grocers, restaurateurs and knifemakers. In this warren, Mr Mizutani had dealt with the same handful of trading families for over half a century. Now many family businesses are calling it a day. To close Tsukiji is to sever Tokyo’s remaining link to its vibrant, mercantile past, celebrated in countless old woodblock prints. It was a natural target for bureaucrats tidying up the world.

Two years back, Tsukiji had hopes of a reprieve. The Toyosu site, where a coal-gas works had once sat, was heavily contaminated. The new governor of Tokyo, Yuriko Koike, put the move on hold. In the end, the inexorable logic of Tokyo’s hosting of the Olympic games in 2020 spelled Tsukiji’s demise. The site, after all, is needed as a car park for Olympic vehicles. After that, presumably, the developers will move in.

What is it about the Olympics? In preparation for its previous hosting of the games, in 1964, Tokyo disfigured itself by filling in the canals that made the city the Venice of the East, and built ugly expressways on top of them. And in Beijing, where Banyan lived when its bid for the 2008 games was accepted, a corrupt Communist elite, on the pretext of preparing Beijing for its global debut, displaced hundreds of thousands of people and razed the hutong, the network of alleyways laid out in the 13th century when conquering Mongol armies settled around the emperor they had just installed. The destruction of Beijing’s ancient fabric was a tragedy. The city’s bombastic new plan worships faceless power and the dour deity of the motor car. A few hutong are preserved as an ersatz tourist experience, just as Ms Koike intends Tsukiji’s outer market to become a culinary theme park.

The Olympics have not been all bad in Asia. Sydney’s site for the games in 2000, 14km out of town, is ageing well as its trees mature. But a predicted post-Olympic tourist bonanza never materialised. Sydneysiders stuck in traffic jams still grumble that all that money would have been better spent improving the city’s creaking infrastructure.

And don’t forget the 1988 games in Seoul. They helped end dictatorship and bring in democracy. On the games’ eve, students and others took to the streets demanding constitutional government. In the full glare of the world’s media the strongman, Chun Doo-hwan, could hardly beat them all up as past practice would have demanded. Soon he was gone, and elections took place. Today South Korea is a beacon of democracy.

Many predicted that the Beijing games would move China in the same direction. But instead of acting as a spur for openness, they were presented as the world coming to China, like so many tribute missions. The Olympics presaged the imperial pomp of President Xi Jinping.

In Sydney in 2000, teams from North and South Korea marched together at the opening ceremony. Now, the two countries want to jointly host the 2032 Olympics. If it nudged North Korea towards democracy, that would be something to celebrate. Luckily there’s no fish market in Pyongyang to get nostalgic about.