President of sushi restaurant chain Sushi-Zanmai, Kiyoshi Kimura,
displays a 222kg bluefin tuna at his main restaurant near Tokyo's Tsukiji fish
market on Saturday. - AFP
TOKYO: A monster bluefin tuna sold for a record-breaking US$1.8
million in the year's first auction at Japan's Tsukiji fish market on Saturday,
nearly three times the previous high set last year.
The 222kg fish, caught off Japan's northern city of Oma,
fetched a winning bid of 155.4 million yen (about US$1.8 million), said an
official at the Tokyo fish market.
The figure dwarfs the previous high of 56.49 million yen
paid at last year's inaugural auction at Tsukiji, a huge working market that
features on many Tokyo tourist itineraries.
Saturday's winning bidder was Kiyoshi Kimura, president of
the company that runs the popular Sushi-Zanmai chain, who also won the auction
for last year's record-breaking bluefin.
"I wanted to meet expectations of my customers who said
they wanted to eat Japan's best tuna again this year," Kimura was quoted
by Jiji Press as saying after the intense pre-dawn bidding.
"With this good tuna, I hope to help cheer up
Japan," Kimura said.
Based on the price paid -- around 700,000 yen per kilogram
-- a single slice of sushi from the monster fish would cost diners as much as
30,000 yen.
But Kimura plans to sell it at a huge loss, for a more
realistic price of up to 398 yen per portion, local media reported.
Bluefin is usually the most expensive fish available at
Tsukiji.
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 three-quarters of the global bluefin catch, a
highly prized sushi ingredient known in Japan as "kuro maguro" (black
tuna) and dubbed by sushi connoisseurs the "black diamond" because of
its scarcity. - AFP
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