“Tsukiji is a freewheeling spot market where one might expect to find competitive, individualistic, short-term profit maximization to be the normal course of events. This book analyzes instead how patterns of trade emerge from and are ordered by the social institutions and cultural patterns… For the engines of economic activity, culture is not simply a lubricant or a fuel… culture designs the cylinders and camshafts, turns the key, shifts gears, unfolds road maps, and writes traffic tickets.”
From this superb book, Theodore Bestor’s “Tsukiji”, an ethnographic analysis of the social and cultural and economic networks of the world’s biggest fish market, in Tokyo. I love this book. It’s making my mind and my stomach hungry. 🍣 🍣
The glitzy eighties gave way to the terrible nineties:
“in the early twenty-first century in a climate of almost palpable despair, the belief that ruination lay just around the corner.”
