Bluefin tuna sells for $400,000 in Japan

Large bluefin tunas are displayed before the first trading of the year at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market Wednesday. Photo: AFP

A bluefin tuna, prized as one of the highest pleasures to grace the palates of sushi aficionados, sold Wednesday for a record price of nearly $400,000 in the year's first auction at Tokyo's Tsukiji fish market.

With the chant of auctioneers starting, the 342-kilogram tuna sold for 32.49 million yen ($396,700), the highest price for a single fish since record-keeping began in 1999 - equivalent to a whopping 95,000 yen ($1,157) per kilogram.

"There's a real mood of celebration with the start of the new year, and that helped push the price higher," said a spokesman for Tsukiji, a warren of stalls in central Tokyo that trades millions of dollars of fish and vegetables a day.

Bluefin tuna is dear to both Japanese hearts and wallets, with Japan consuming more than half of the world's bluefin even as supplies dwindle and fishing quotas are tightened.

However, with appetites for Japanese food growing globally, Japan faces ever-stiffer competition for the endangered fish.

"The custom of eating raw fish is spreading throughout the world, so that it's no longer an era where Japan is consuming all of the limited supply of tuna," an auction manager said.

As if to prove his point, the giant fish, which was caught off Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido, was jointly bought by a sushi restaurant in Tokyo's posh Ginza district and Hong Kong sushi restaurateur Ricky Cheng.

Reuters