Amami Superman Photography

My friend Kevin is visiting and I thought it would be cool to wake up early and go see the local fish market. It's not like Pike Place Market near downtown Seattle, but it is a sight to see nonetheless. So we woke up just before 5:00AM this morning and walked down to the market.

The fisherman leave the previous night and come back early the next morning to sell the fish they've caught. I'm not exactly sure about the rules and regulations for buying fish, but I know that not just anyone can come and buy fish. You have to be a licensed buyer to be able to bid on the fish. After they set all the fish out first, then they start the bidding. Most of the buyers are supermarkets, sushi restaurants and seafood shops (kind of like meat shops).

When we first got there they already had some fish set out. This large fish first caught my eye. I don't know what it's called in English, but they call it "Ara" in Japanese. It's a deep sea fish.



They had all kinds of seafood here. They had different varieties of octopus and squid along with different varieties of shellfish.


This squid was still alive and changing colors when I took this photo. Afraid of being squirted with ink, I was taking a chance getting this close.

After checking out the fish they already had set out, we moved over to where the boats were unloading their fish. This one is unloading Kihada maguro, Yellowfin tuna.




I've been out deep sea jigging a few times and I've caught a few Yellowfin tuna before. Most of the ones I caught were were around 6-8kg, not much smaller than these. I was starting to think that maybe this was the regular size until this guy finally pulled out a decent sized one.




It makes me wonder how many cans of tuna this could make and how many tuna salad sandwiches.

The boat down the dock from the previous one was just getting ready to unload its fish and I hoped to see some different kinds.




Although I had hoped for a different kind of fish, they pulled out tuna after tuna from this boat. The cool thing about this boat was that it put the previous boat's tuna to shame when comparing size. Their smallest tuna was as big as the other boat's biggest.




The three of these guys almost dropped this tuna when they tried to throw it over the edge of the ice box. It took four of them to actually get it over.




Chinuki is basically the process of bleeding the fish. They cut out one side of the gills to drain the blood from the fish as they did in the above photo.






I mentioned at the beginning of this post that only licensed buyers are able to buy fish, but sometimes they look the other way for old people and let them choose some of the smaller not-so-popular fish for free. I think that's pretty generous of them. They also hold an open market sometimes on Sundays where the public is able to purchase fish also.








So that was our early morning excursion. Kevin thought it was pretty cool. I wanted to go home and go back to bed. I was still sleepy.