No More Tuna for Tourists!
When you visit another country, it’s imperative you respect their local customs, lest you get banned due to improper behavior. Some people never learn, though, which is why, as of Thursday, April 8, Tokyo tourists are banned for one month from setting foot inside the Tsukiji fish market while a tuna fish auction is in process.
The Tsukiji fish market, officially known as the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Whole Market, is the world’s largest wholesale market for fish, fruit, vegetables, meat and flowers. Everyday thousands of tourists, not to mention over 2000 tons of seafood, pass through the market.
Especially attractive to tourists are the market’s tuna fish auctions, which occur between 5am to 6am, and require a tremendous number of employees, none of whom have time to waste on buffoonery.
Since hundreds of tourists typically gather to watch a sale, a surplus of stringent rules—including no large bags/suitcases, no flash photography and even no high-heeled shoes or sandals, to name a few—have been enacted to prevent interruptions to the money-making process.
Recent drunken behavior by tourists has made enforcing these rules especially troublesome for Tsukiji fish market employees. According to BBC news, drunken tourists have been stumbling to the early-morning auctions directly from the club. And as any connoisseur of alcohol is well aware, drunken people do stupid things.
To be more precise, drunken tourists have been caught obscuring “the hand signals used to make bids,” laying their hands across fish they’ve not purchased, and even hugging & kissing fish that they’ve drunkenly mistaken for hot bar chicks in heat.
The recent activity, especially the drunken fish kissing, has prompted the the Metropolitan Government to step in and institute a temporary one-month ban preventing tourists from visiting the auctions, although the rest of the market is still available for them to peruse.
The lesson of this story is quite simple: when drunk, go to bed, and not to the tuna market!
Although we were sadly unable to locate a video of these tourists acting stupid at the market, we did manage to acquire an insider’s view of a tuna auction.
By V Saxena on 14-04-2010
V Saxena
