Tsukiji Fish Market Inc., based in Vancouver, Canada, will begin handling the import of marine products to Japan from Fiji. The items will be offered through the company’s Japanese-language website to Canadian customers.
Tsukiji Fish Market owner Takuya Hikita made the announcement while exhibiting at the 22nd Japan International Seafood & Technology Expo, which took place from 30 September to 2 October at Tokyo Big Sight.
The new sourcing relationship was forged through support from the South Pacific Economic Exchange Support Center (also called the Pacific Island Centre, or PIC), an organization established by the government of Japan and the South Pacific Forum to assist forum island countries (FICs) in sustainable economic development through the promotion of trade, investment and tourism between Japan and the FICs. The forum island countries are Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. The South Pacific Forum consists of the FICs plus Australia and New Zealand.
The new relationship is a follow-on to previous imports of white mottled grouper and speckled blue grouper from the Marshall Islands to Japan that started in September of 2018. That connection grew out of a name-card exchange with a representative of the PIC at an event among embassies in Tokyo in 2014, followed up by continued communications and promotion by PIC.
“We recognize that fishery is one of the most important business sectors the Pacific islands, and we started participating in Japan Seafood Expo since last year to support interested businesses or organizations to promote seafood products in Japan,” Pacific Islands Centre Promotion Coordinator Yukie Matsui said. “For the expo, we keep in our mind to assist businesses who are actually working in Pacific islands or with people in these countries, not like Japanese businesses paying a fishing fee to catch fish and just bringing them back to the country.”
Hikita, who served as a seafood auctioneer at Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market for a more than a decade, set up his business in June 2018 to import Japanese foods from the market (now at Toyosu) and offer them in the Vancouver, Canada area, mainly to Japanese living there who would like a taste of home. The company’s extensive item list of 70 items – ranging from seaweed to flying fish surimi – is available Japanese and English.
Additionally, a collaboration with a Japanese sushi chef also working in Vancouver, Hiroshi Hoshiko, has resulted in a restaurant in downtown Vancouver, called Tsukiji Kitchen, for which Hikita acts as seafood buyer. The restaurant is temporarily closed due to COVID-19, but the take-out sushi business is active, selling high-end “orizume” box-set sushi sets in the range of CAD 115 to CAD 300 (USD 87 to USD 227, EUR 74 to EUR 194).
Hikita also acts as a buyer for Seafood City, a fish market and restaurant supplier located in Vancouver’s Granville Island Public Market, where he is dubbed a “seafood concierge.” While importing foods to Canada has been the main thrust of Tsukiji Fish Market Inc., Hikita said in his website’s blog that he is planning a shift to what he calls “D-to-D,” or domestic-to-domestic, using local products for his Canadian customers.
Photo courtesy of Takuya Hikita/Tsukiji Fish Market Inc.
