Japan:For a nation that consumes one-third of the world's fish, few areas of Japan are as symbolic as Tsukiji.
The giant fish market in the heart of Tokyo probably handles 20 times more fish a year than New York's Fulton Fishmarket and London's Billingsgate combined. Everything from Minke whale to sea urchins passes across its slippery floors.
But if the government has its way, toxic chemicals will soon be seeping into all that glistening fresh flesh. That at least is what critics say will happen if they don't block a plan to relocate the 72-year-old market to a site built on reclaimed land a couple of miles away. Once owned by Tokyo Gas, the site on a wharf in Toyosu near Tokyo bay squats on ground soil contaminated by a cocktail of toxic effluent from the company's plants.
Tsukiji's wholesalers and traders are up in arms. "This is an outrage that gives no consideration to food safety," said wholesaler Takashi Saito at a press conference hosted by opponents of the plan this week.
The opponents say they will fight until the city government, which operates the market, backs down. It is not difficult to understand their concern. There are few places in the world that handle as much raw meat, a good deal of which stays raw, as sushi and sashimi, all the way into millions of Japanese mouths.
The thought of arsenic, mercury, lead, cadmium and benzene, all of which have been detected at dangerously high levels on the Tokyo bay site, anywhere near that food is, well, stomach-churning.
Even plans to add metres of fresh top-soil, pave the site with asphalt and put the fish on an elevated floor before the move in 2012 have failed to convince the market's vendors. Some warn that an earthquake could shift the ground under the site, sending polluted groundwater into the nation's fish-basket.
Tokyo's right-wing governor, Shintaro Ishihara, ignored a majority vote against the relocation by the giant trading organisation, the Wholesale Co-operatives of Tokyo Fish Market, and a 120,000-strong petition collected by opponents. If he has his way, and he usually does, venerable old Tsukiji will be turned into a flash new media centre for the proposed 2016 Olympics. Most people accept that the crumbling market has to be rebuilt. About 60,000 people work under its leaky roof and hundreds of forklifts and light trucks career dangerously across bumpy, slippery floors.
Most days, foreign tourists can be seen gawking in awe at the controlled bedlam that somehow manages to feed the nation.
But the small businesses that dominate the opposition to the relocation plan fear they won't survive the move. Many are run by second- and third-generation owners hit hard by large supermarket chains and wholesalers, which have eaten into their businesses by dealing directly with the ports and fish farms that supply Tsukiji's product. "They're fighting a losing war," the owner of a frozen seafood firm told the Asahi newspaper recently. "Tsukiji is getting old and the Tokyo government will not reverse itself."