Like every year, Japan welcomes the New Year with its most famous fish auction. This time, however, the numbers were unlike anything seen before: $3.2 million, to be exact. A massive Pacific bluefin tuna sold for a staggering $3.2 million at Tokyo's famed Toyosu fish market on Monday, setting a new record.
The 243-kilogram (535-pound) tuna was snapped up by Kiyomura Corp., operator of the popular Sushi Zanmai restaurant chain, whose president Kiyoshi Kimura once again dominated the predawn bidding. The final price (510 million yen) surpassed the previous record of 334 million yen that Kimura himself set in 2019.
"I was hoping it would be a bit cheaper," Kimura told reporters after the auction. "But the price shot up before you knew it." The record-breaking tuna was caught off the coast of Oma in northern Japan, a region renowned for producing some of the country's finest bluefin. The fish's final price works out to about 2.1 million yen ($13,360) per kilogram.
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