The line goes down the block, at five in the morning.

The Tsukiji Market, in Tokyo, has some of the freshest sea food you will ever see, let alone taste. This gigantic, sprawling epicenter of Japanese seafood commerce features hundreds of restaurants, kitchen wholesalers, and forklifts traveling at breakneck speeds. Octopus meatballs, grilled eels, and uni - sea urchin gonads - are all available, at not unreasonable prices.

For years, the tuna auctions were a must-see: starting from 5am, gigantic tunas are laid out for the highest bidder. In 2008, the first specimen sold for over six million yen - about $60,000 dollars. This was not a record: in 2001, a 400+ lb. tuna sold sold for over twenty million yen. More than anything, tourists would flock to this auction, if only to see for one hour the cutthroat competition that only a fishing empire can produce.

Sadly, this same sort of competition has run several fishing stocks to near extinction, at least commercially. In 2006, one investigation discovered that Japanese had illegally caught three times their fishing quota - for the past twenty years, every year. It was a fraud worth $2 billion, in bluefish tuna alone.

These days, tourists are no longer allowed to attend the tuna auction. Officially, camera flashes were distracting auctioneers. But unofficially, tourists just didn’t want to get up at 4am - and had stayed up all night, drinking.