Japanese Seafood: More Colorful than the Aurora Borealis

Smack in the middle of the Pacific, Earth's deepest and oldest ocean, Japan serves what may be the world’s most diverse and toothsome selection of seafood. Sushi (a catgory of vinegared-rice treats that do not necessarily contain fish)is wildly popular today, but it wasn’t long ago that most deemed it rare and scary. I’ll never forget one night in the early 1980s when I tried to impress a date by acting nonplussed as I nearly choked on my first-ever bite of raw fish, a stringy bit of tuna at Lenge restaurant. I recovered quickly and by the time I started enjoying sushi “Desperately Seeking Susan” was released, drawing big laughs when Madonna jumped in a taxi and the driver rambled on about his food preferences: "We used to have Chinese restaurants, Italian restaurants. Now you have these sushi restaurants. Everyone goes for sushi. Sushi. I hate the stuff.  Although, I tell you, I had some the other day. I took it home, I cooked it, it wasn't bad. It tasted like fish."

Every sushi connoisseur knows about the many grades of ultra-pricey toro (fatty tuna belly):

   

A lesser-known delicacy is engawa. The first definition of engawa in a Japanese dictionary is the traditional corridor in the Japanese home, but calling for engawa at a sushi bar will yield crunchy elongated bits of fluke scraped from the fin's edge. Precious little seafood goes to waste in Japan - here a fish monger uses a spoon to scoop up every tidbit of tuna:

Seafood has always been a prominent feature of Japanese culture and things oceanic are gulped with gusto, from refined salt to seaweed to fish so tiny a hundred or so fit in a thimble-sized bowl:

Each Japanese port has a seafood specialty, none more prized than those of the cold northern islands like Hokkaido. Sendai people are known for their love of a particularly funky-looking critter, hoya, aka Pineapple-of-the-Sea.

Hoya, with its salty taste and cuttlefish-like texture, is a sea squirt, a family of gorgeously-ugly blobs ranging in color from screaming yellow and lurid purple to painfully bright blue.

Fishermen on the Hozu River use extremely long poles to catch tiny fish, in particular Kyoto's revered ayu a type of fresh water trout:

A four-ounce salt-grilled shioyaki-style ayu costs about $1 an inch – it was so lip-smackin’ sweet I’d gladly pay double.

While even fiercely-spiked lion fish are powerless to fight the extraordinary rise in global sushi consumption and its threat to the sustainability of ocean life, Mother Nature never seems to run out of variety.  Can anyone identify the type of fish below, the much-beloved mascot of an outdoor seafood market/restaurant on the island of Oshima in Ehime prefecture?

 
He's not for sale but they'll sell you just about anything else, plus a bucket of glowing coals so you can cook for yourself: