Yes, yes, I know he does it for marketing purposes, we've been posting on the giant bluefins and the giant New Year auction prices for years*, but global financial conditions are very loosey-goosey.
From Greek Reporter, January 6:
A giant bluefin tuna fetched a record 510 million yen, or about $3.2 million, at the first auction of the year at Tokyo’s Toyosu fish market. The 535-pound fish was sold Monday in a highly anticipated New Year’s event, drawing attention for its size, price, and origin.
The winning bidder was Kiyoshi Kimura, president of Kiyomura Corp., which runs the Sushi Zanmai restaurant chain. Kimura, a familiar figure at these auctions, outbid competitors to claim the catch. The purchase surpassed his previous record set in 2019, when he paid 334 million yen ($2.1 million) for a tuna of similar quality.
Kimura calls purchasing a symbol of luck and quality
Kimura told reporters he had planned to pay less but said the bidding escalated quickly. He described the purchase as a combination of good luck and irresistible quality. Although he had not tasted the fish yet, he was confident it would meet high expectations....
We've been on the Bluefin beat for a few years, links below....
June 2020 - "Sustainable Bluefin Tuna? Not So Fast."
August 2023 - Our Friend, The Bluefin Tuna
October 2022 - "Tuna"
From Granta, October 18:
Ernest Hemingway thrilled to the tuna: to their size, and their strength. They are big as a grizzly bear, and he loved them for it. Most reach around 1.8 metres, but the largest outliers of the largest species, the Atlantic bluefin, can be twice that, and more than six hundred kilograms. In 1922, watching a school of tuna hunt a run of sardines from the Spanish port of Vigo, Hemingway wrote in a newspaper dispatch about a ‘big tuna who breaks water with a boiling crash and . . . falls back into the water with the noise of a horse diving off a dock’. Their colossal heft allowed him to conceive of fishing for tuna as a heroic struggle, pure masculinity versus the ocean. He wrote,
. . . if you land a big tuna after a six-hour fight, fight him man against fish when your muscles are nauseated with the unceasing strain, and finally bring him alongside the boat, green-blue and silver in the lazy ocean, you will be purified and be able to enter unabashed into the presence of the very elder gods, and they will make you welcome.
Okay, we're not as into tuna as Hemingway was.
