Sushi In Crisis Over Chinese Appetiteff

Dwindling supplies of quality fish and competition from wealthy Chinese buyers means Japan is having to get used to horse sushi on the menu.

For a generation, fishing harbors around the world have acknowledged the existence of a phenomenon that we can think of as the Japanese seafood premium. In the early 1970s, new air-cargo connections linked a global supply of fish, molluscs, and crustaceans with a ravenous Japanese demand for it. The country’s new wealth ensured that for any sea product for which there exists an appetite in Tokyo - and the Japanese are famously free-spirited in their attitude towards eating things as varied as toxic blowfish, whale bacon and barnacles - a Japanese buyer will pay a premium over all foreign competitors. And so the catch of the day inevitably ended up in Tokyo, and the rest of the world settled for leftovers.

Last week, a front-page New York Times story addressed a growing sense of national crisis in Japan over declining availability of wild bluefin tuna, the trophy fish of the sushi bar and perhaps the country’s most prized culinary delicacy. Faced with dwindling supply and rising prices, picky chefs have become forced to deal with lesser-quality big-eye or yellowfin tuna or the stigmatized ranched bluefin. The more farsighted among them, the New York Times reported, were already pondering the scenario of a post-tuna menu, and experimenting with red-meat substitutes including venison, horse, and whale.

In reality, this was an obituary for the Japanese seafood premium, and the birth notice for what will shortly be recognized as China’s seafood premium. The perennial Japanese fear about being usurped by their historical rivals to the west has taken a new angle: the Chinese will, quite literally, eat their lunch. The Chinese have not traditionally preferred their fish raw, but sushi bars catering to new luxury tastes have begun popping up in the country’s commercial cities - ultimately pitting the two countries against each other in bidding wars on docks worldwide. “The Chinese are going to pay more than what the Japanese can pay very soon. That means exporters will be looking into the China market, not Japan,” Tom Asakawa, a fisheries-trade official at the US embassy in Tokyo, told me in late 2005. “Five years from now, Japanese consumers will not be able to eat good-quality sashimi. You’ll have to go to China to do that.”

It didn’t take five years. Buyers at the early-morning tuna auctions at the Tsukiji market in downtown Tokyo - where each day millions of dollars in fish are swapped in just a few minutes with coded hand signals - are already packing up their purchases and putting them on planes to Shanghai hours later. (In many cases, those fish arrived by plane - from the Atlantic, Mediterranean, or South Pacific - the night before.) But some version of this transaction, diverting the daily catch from Japanese mouths, has been taking place for almost a decade: Atlantic bluefin caught off the New England coast being eaten in Boston or Mediterranean farmed tuna ending up in London.

When the Japan’s economic bubble burst in the early 1990s, the corporate expense accounts indirectly subsidizing top sushi bars contracted, at the same time as American and European diners started paying more for their meals. Much as environmentalists like to blame the Japanese government for the overfishing of worldwide bluefin stocks - a sense of sovereign entitlement for tuna led to an ecological recklessness - the country’s consumers bear responsibility, too, for their declining access to top fish.

High-quality fresh seafood was one of the few good import businesses into Japan. Diners there could savor either the delicate textures of raw fish or their country’s quick shift from the periphery of the global economy to its center, noted monthly with a growing current account surplus built on a roaring export business in cars and electronics. The trade gap, it turned out, was not a one-way exchange of goods, but a quiet two-way flow of taste and ideas. There’s a reason sushi bars surfaced in Los Angeles in the 1960s, in Amsterdam in the 1970s, in Hong Kong in the 1980s, in Moscow in the 1990s, and in Shanghai today.

Demand for sushi has followed integration into the global economy, and in the postwar period those patterns of trade and foreign investment have had a particularly Japanese flavor. Sushi bars followed the Japanese corporate money, and local appetites followed Japanese tastes.

Now China’s growing trade surplus means that the world’s dockside premium will likely be set by chefs in Shanghai. If Japanese diners want to avoid a permanent lunch of horse sushi, their best hope might be in a rising China - and that the twenty-first century’s global tastemakers use their new mercantile reach to drive up prices for sea cucumber and pass on the raw tuna.