Tsukiji, Tsujii, and Resilience

This is the fish market at Tsukiji, Tokyo, the busiest fish market in the world. The highly specialised world of the fish traders and their chefs are also featured as a revealing side-story in the documentary on Jiro Ono (Jiro Dreams of Sushi, 2011, David Gelb, Magnolia). Here, there is the unmistakeable scent of the pride of tradesmen, their apprentices, and the relationships that built modern post-war Japan. Japan’s story is one of a constant struggle between stability and change, orderliness and disruption, as the country totters towards the brink of the silver tsunami. The remarkable resilience of the Japanese is told again and again from the rubbles of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the tragedy of Fukushima, and in the quiet dignity of the music composed by the blind prodigy Nobuyuki Tsujii: Elegy for the victims of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami.

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