The price of red sea bream is now a quarter of what it was 20 years ago, while flounder and grouper are half the price. Is this the result of reduced fish consumption?
When I was in my 30s and working at a fishery cooperative in Hiroshima, I looked into market price movements. Nationwide, Hiroshima, Iwakuni, and Yanai (Fujima). Yanai was offering relatively good prices. Fujima Fisheries in Yanai is not a public facility, but it was offering better prices than the Hiroshima market (I don't know if it's still there). It is the owner of the wedding venue Belze, a catering service, and restaurants.
The red sea bream mentioned in this article. As I recall, the price exceeded 30,000 yen per kilo at the end of the year.
The market is closed from New Year's Day, so the fishery cooperative does not buy the catch on the 31st. In Okikamuro, a fishery company from Hiroshima would come to the fishermen's boats and buy the fish on the spot. This was called "offshore buying."
The fishery cooperative banned this offshore buying. It was like selling the fish on the black market, so it did not become income for the cooperative. Also, there was a possibility that the fishermen would be caught for tax evasion. At that time, the fishery cooperative declared it in a lump sum. But at the end of the year, it was OK. The price was over 10,000 yen per kilo.
On the evening of New Year's Eve, fishermen returning from offshore were bragging, saying things like "I got and bought it at price XX" or "I sold it at price XX."
What's the current price of sea bream at the beach? I won't say, but it's cheaper than hagi. Personally, I think red sea bream is the best tasting. Whether eaten raw, grilled, boiled or fried, red sea bream is delicious. No other fish makes as good a stock as red sea bream, even from its bones.
The reason we named our guesthouse "Tai no Sato" (Sea Bream Village) is because my father was a fisherman who specialized in sea bream, but the king of fish is red sea bream. Good taste and good looks. This wouldn't look good in the villages of rockfish and baldness.
Shoji Matsumoto
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