Lost in Translation: The Astonishing, Dangerous Blowfish Caper

Fugu sashimi, right. (Image from Wikimedia Commons); pufferfish images, left, unattributed on Pixabay.

By J Brooks Spector

16 Aug 2024

Accidentally owning a giant tuna, the agonising death of a poisoned homonym… and other cautionary Japanese fish tales.

The Japanese love to eat. Well, okay, everybody loves to eat, but the Japanese consume a nearly unimaginable variety of meals based on the bounty of the land and the ocean, although there are many rules.

Years ago, when we lived in Tokyo, one of our favourite amusements whenever we had an overseas visitor was to take him (or her) to the Tsukiji Central Fish Market, especially if they loved to cook. The key to that adventure, however, was to get there before six in the morning. Otherwise, you missed most of the fun.

Tsukiji, as it was usually called, since everybody knew what you meant, was a vast facility. There was row after row, aisle after aisle of vendors offering the freshest possible catches from the oceans surrounding Japan’s islands. Miniature, electric forklift vehicles whizzed around the place bringing in new containers of fish to the appropriate vendors and collecting orders already placed by restaurants and wholesale food dealers to take them to dispatch vehicles outside the building next to one of its entrances.

Some of the vendors specialised in more familiar types of fish, such as flounder, mackerel, bonito and yellowtail tuna. Others offered all manner of live shellfish and strange slithery creatures, moving about in trays filled with seawater. Pretty much everything is edible if you prepare it correctly.

The floor of this vast enterprise was constantly being swept and hosed down and so it almost seemed as if the floor was cleaner than the tables in some restaurants, despite the industrial scale of the enterprise.

The best moment of a trip to Tsukiji was to observe the bluefin tuna auction held each morning just after sunrise. Arrayed in a rough semicircle, there would be massive bluefin tuna carcasses, minus their heads and tails, and a corresponding arc of buyers opposite to the fish. The auctioneer would start the bidding and via a series of mysterious hand signals, winks and nods, the buyers would bid against one another – but only after having sampled tiny bits of the fish carcasses’ flesh to measure their freshness, the quality of the meat, and its fish oil content by how it tasted to a very experienced mouth.

Bluefin tuna being sliced for customers, left, at Toyosu fish market in Tokyo. (Image by Michael Wave on Unsplash) Art of filleting bluefin tuna, right. (Image by Beth Macdonald on Unsplash)

I used to caution my visitors that whatever they did, they must not raise their hands or make any gestures, lest they own, by accident, a giant tuna carcass weighing hundreds of kilograms. These fish were certainly not cheap, and one of them could easily be sold for $30,000, before being divided up by wholesalers in order to be distributed to clients all over the city in their stores and restaurants.

(For more on the complex intricacies of the global bluefin tuna supply chain that has been developed over the past 50 years – with specialist fish brokers at quaysides in New England on their satellite phones speaking with buyers in Tokyo – to bring those massive fish straight to the market in less than a day, read this piece on global sushi and this story on bluefin tuna from Boston to Tokyo.

One of the other joys of a fish market visit was to go to the next street over for an early lunch to enjoy some of the freshest sushi and sashimi one could ever hope for, cut from fish just auctioned off or procured from the adjacent fish market. Sadly, much of the trade of the Tsukiji Fish Market has now been diverted to a newer, more modern facility, the Toyosu Fish Market. To survey that scene properly, one would probably have to rise even earlier to visit when it was in full swing, but you would be rewarded with the sight of a yet-larger enterprise, dedicated to ensuring the 50 million or so people in the greater Tokyo metropolitan area all get the freshest possible fish.

Of course, one conceivably could get even fresher fish than from the fish market, but that would probably have to be directly from a fishing trawler. We actually did that once while visiting the city of Hakodate on the southern tip of the big, northern island of Hokkaido, when we lived in Sapporo. Back when the Japanese period of isolation from external contact was coming to an end in the mid 19th century, the Japanese had built a modern fort on a hill at Hakodate, overlooking the strait between Hokkaido and Honshu (the country’s main island). Russian traders had set up a trading post there to take advantage of trading opportunities and a Russian Eastern Orthodox Church they built remains there from that period.

Bluefin tuna being worked at Toyosu fish market in Tokyo. (Image by Wikimedia Commons)

A friend of my wife (we both had children in the same yochien – creche – before her family had moved to Hakodate) had invited us for lunch in a restaurant at the harbour. A unique feature of that restaurant was that it was constructed with a rear door onto a pier for fishing boats to offload their catches of the day – including those soft, buttery scallops that the waters around Hokkaido were famous for – along with some of the freshest fish one could imagine, unless one was eating while swimming in the ocean. Freshness really matters, obviously, when the fish to be consumed is still raw.

But speaking of fresh or exotic fish, let us also consider the humble blowfish, variously called pufferfish, puffers, balloon-fish, blowfish, blowers, blowies, bubblefish, globefish, swell-fish, toadfish, toadies, toadle, honey toads, sugar toads and sea squab. Back when I was a child, one of the easiest catches at the New Jersey seashore (in the saltwater bay, located between the mainland and that offshore island that was the modest beach town) was a species of blowfish. (See here for a full description of those fishes).

Those fish were the little guys that when they sensed danger would swell up to make themselves look fearsome to potential predators. Barbs on their skin would pop out and they looked like little yellow balloons covered in nasty spikes.

Fugu sashimi, right. (Image from Wikimedia Commons); pufferfish images, left, unattributed on Pixabay.

The cooking method was simplicity in itself. Once caught, one would cut them across the back of the body, hook the head on a nail and use a pair of big kitchen tongs to pull out a perfect fillet of flesh. To cook, one would bread the cutlets lightly, season with some Old Bay seasoning, and grill quickly in some butter or olive oil.

I suspect these Atlantic fish must have been a bit different from their Japanese cousins, however. Nobody ever warned us about the fatal toxicity of the organs in the ones caught off New Jersey, and so we blithely went about catching, cleaning, cooking and eating them.

But the blowfish caught from Japanese waters are very different. Dolphins have been filmed “playing” with the puffers so that the toxins in their skins give the dolphins a bit of a high. The internal organs of the species consumed in Japan contain neurotoxins such that just a tiny bit of the liver or some other organ left on the fishes’ flesh can actually kill someone.

And so I made my acquaintance with the Japanese fugu fish. I once was in the port city of Niigata for a conference on the political and economic relations between the then Soviet Union, China, Japan and the two Koreas – the nations that border the Japan sea – and what the possibilities for future economic development on the Yalu and Tyumen River basins might be. (Low, apparently.) Anyway, a Japanese colleague who had accompanied us on the trip suggested we go to a famous restaurant in town specialising in fugu fish.

So, off we went, three of us, two Americans and one Japanese diner, and we noted approvingly and reassuringly that the restaurant that had been selected proudly displayed the certificates on the wall that indicated the chef in charge was licensed to serve fugu. That meant he had been through a special course and knew how to cut the fish properly without endangering the lives of any diners by serving a fleck of the fish’s liver.

The fugu liver’s poison was a neurotoxin and the explanation was that if you were poisoned by it, first you would feel a tingling in your fingers and toes, and then numbness. The numbness would begin travelling up your extremities and then, eventually, within an hour or so, it was curtains. Over and out. Permanently. Bye, bye. Dinner thus had a real frisson of danger to it, beyond the rather bland taste of the fugu meat itself.

As our meal progressed, I happened to notice that our chef – we were seated at a counter where we could watch the chef’s wizardry – had been knocking back shots of sake all evening long. That led me to wonder if he was imbibing to keep his hand steady or to calm his own nerves; and then, crucially, to contemplate what would happen if he made a slight mistake or two.

After dinner, back in my hotel room, I found myself checking my fingers and toes every few minutes to see if the dreaded neurotoxin was kicking in. We survived, although each year a number of Japanese diners actually do perish from their adventure with fugu fish, despite precautions only allowing licensed chefs to serve it.

Actually, I had had a previous encounter with the murderous fugu fish years before that experience in Niigata – vicariously. Back when I was first studying Japanese at the embassy’s language school in Yokohama (the school taught American, Canadian and New Zealand diplomats as well as a few military personnel), students were subjected to an intensive programme that ran from eight in the morning until four in the afternoon.

For me, the most terrifying part of the experience was always something called “radio news”. The instructors selected a broadcast story every morning from the national radio network’s newscasts, roughly suitable for the level of each student, and then gave each student an audio tape to listen to, to understand, and then, in the next hour, to be ready to explain (in Japanese, of course) the nature of the story and why it was important, for the edification of one of our long-suffering instructors.

Inevitably, there would be words that were not yet in a student’s vocabulary, or a usage new to the student – that was a key point of the exercise. It was purposely designed to stretch a student’s capabilities. An important part of the Japanese language to be mastered is the multiple ways homonyms crop up in spoken language – although in written texts that oral problem was missing since the words would be written differently in the kanji, katakana or hiragana scripts. As a result, one might well understand what a written word meant, even if the reader might be incapable of deciding which pronunciation from among the many phonemes in use were the correct ones.

One day, as I continued my slow but erratic learning of the language, I was handed a tape of a story about the dai-fugu-by-by. “Dai” means great or large and “by” has several homonyms in English as well, as the reader may have noticed.

As I listened to my news story several times, I gradually developed my understanding of a large-scale poisoning of diners from tainted fugu fish meat. My instructor for that morning, Konno-sensei, listened with great interest, but increasing incredulity, as I spun my tale of disaster, as I understood it. He was an extraordinarily taciturn man with great natural dignity, something seemingly unsullied despite years of student insults to his language.

My unique spin on the tale, however, may just have been too much for him, despite his famous rectitude. His face grew dark; his eyes widened; he was working hard to contain his laughter. He tactfully reminded me the Japanese language had a special feature of borrowing, then absorbing English words into it, and then making unusual uses of them in otherwise normal Japanese sentences.

For example, a new film or live stage play would be going on a “road show” in Japan when it was on its first run, and the classic navy blue suit worn by businessmen was a “seibiro”, derived from the term, Savile Row.

In my radio news ordeal, a correct reading of the headline should, rather, have brought me to an understanding of special market reporting on the very productive catch of the lowly fugu fish being brought to market, and thus becoming a great purchasing moment for customers. Thus the “buy-buy” of fugu fish – as opposed to the agonising deaths of hordes of innocent diners-out, or bye-bye.

In a future article we shall explore the mysteries of the famous Japanese lunch box, the way exotic, previously foreign foods have worked their way into the Japanese diet, the amazing nature of “ikizukuri” cuisine, the special nature of sake tastings – and what you should never serve to a hungry crowd of fellow Japanese employees for a casual dinner after work. DM

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