Friday October 16, 2009 Amami Island

VIDEO- Japan Blue Fin Tuna Farm Amami, Island October 16, 2009

Wow I'm finally on Japan time! Doesn't matter too much as we only get 4 hours sleep a night if we're lucky. Every day starts around 5:00 with our schedule to see everything, and we usually end up going to bed around midnight.
We stayed in the village of Naza last night on Amami Island. It's a small village where we had a different type of dinner in a small restaurant that served basically sushi and pork. The whole place sat about 15 people and everyone gets the same thing, no ordering. The food comes out in stages, and even our hosts couldn't determine what some of the fish and vegetables we were eating. This morning we went back to the Blue Fin farm at the southern end of Amami. They were excited to show us the harvest of the tuna, but asked us not to photograph. Takayu has developed some proprietary machinery to make this process as fast and stress free as possible so I will have to explain. The Blue Fin are swimming in the ocean right up to the point that they are slaughtered so as not to get them stressed which is critical to maintain quality. From that point on, it's a race against time to get them bled out and chilled down to keep the meat as fresh and high quality as possible, and they do this with swift precision. We could only watch this for about an hour, but this took us through 18 Blue Fins from catching to storage. From there we had the 2 hour ride back to the airport and 2 flights to Tokyo and flew over Mt. Aso, an active volcano with the smoke plummet stretching up for miles. In Tokyo we met with Mitsubishi Corporation (yes the car company, but they are huge here and have many business including Tuna). They are very concerned with sustainability and are in contact with Green Peace as well.

Tomorrow brings us to the Tskiji market to the fish auction and other retail stores. It will be another early morning, being picked up at 4:30 am. I'm hoping for some great photos from there!