Wednesday, January 5, 2011

$390,000 for One Tuna Fish!? You Could Buy a Car With That!

Update from James B. Allen below

Yep. You read the headlines correctly. Well, it is actually $396,340 (USD) at today's rate. The first tuna auctioned off at Tokyo's famous fish market at Tsukiji sold for nearly $400,000; a new record!

This one is selling for 1/3 the price of the new record....
Jeez! How big is that fish?!

The AP reports:

A bluefin tuna from Hokkaido fetched a record-high 32.49 million yen on Wednesday in the first auction of the year on the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market, commonly known as Tsukiji market, market officials said. The price for the 342-kilogram tuna, caught off Toi in Japan's northernmost prefecture, is the highest since 1999 when comparable data became available. It was well above the previous record of 20.2 million yen marked in 2001.





Maybe 2011 is going to be a big spender year after all.... Or, is that just because the government keeps printing so much money that our cash is getting nearly worthless!


So Like I wrote: $390,000 for one tuna fish? You could buy a car with that... OR, "How many cans of tuna would that make?"


Update from James B. Allen:


"Mike - check the exchange rate - you're off one decimal point :). 32.49 million yen is around $400,000 USD. Just shy of half a million dollars." 


Thanks to News on Japan

2 comments:

  1. I'd rather buy gold with the money...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I just bought an entire saba fish (mackerel) at the local market here in northern Japan and it only cost 200 Yen, about $2.40. It was delicious. Those people at Tsukiji are insane!

    ReplyDelete

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