The King Of Sushi

This segment was originally broadcast on Jan. 13, 2008. It was updated on Sept. 4, 2008.

Sushi is becoming so popular these days, you can find it in grocery stores all over America. But it's distinctly Japanese, and the Japanese have turned sushi into a multibillion-dollar international business.

Sushi wouldn't be sushi without tuna, particularly bluefin tuna. It is so revered in Japan that they call it the" king of sushi."

But as correspondent Bob Simon reported last January, the bluefin is in deep trouble.

It's delivered on ice, in custom-made wooden boxes called "coffins," to the Tokyo fish market, which is called Tsukiji. It's the place where the world's top sushi chefs get their fish.

More fish flow through Tsukiji than any other market on earth. More money, too: $4 billion a year. In today's global economy, fishermen from around the world watch the prices set at Tsukiji, which enables them to figure out what their catch is worth.

Harvard anthropology professor Ted Bestor understands the movement of money and tuna. He's been studying Japanese sushi culture for the last 20 years. "This place is the nerve center of a global fishing industry," he explains.

"Sort of like a Wall Street of fish," Simon remarks.

"Yeah. It is. It is," Bestor agrees. "There's no futures market, no derivatives. But other than that, it's like the Wall Street of fish."

At four o'clock every morning, six days a week, the buyers arrive at the market's fresh tuna hall to check out what's on offer.

How do buyers tell what's good and not so good?

"Well, if you look over you can see them rolling the tuna over on their side, looking in the belly. They're looking for the fat content. They're looking for the color of the meat. They're x-raying the fish and then you'll see that they'll take a little piece and they'll rub it between their thumb and forefingers. And that's to get a sense of the oil content," Bestor explains.

"So these guys must be the toughest customers in the world," Simon remarks.

"Absolutely," Bestor agrees. "They know their fish inside and out."

Bestor says the buyers also know the market inside out and are prepared to pay the highest price in the world.

The average price of a single bluefin tuna is anywhere between $2,000 and $20,000. It all depends on the size, the season, and their fat content - the fattier, the better.

Tsunenori Ida is one of the most respected buyers in the market. His family has been bidding on top quality bluefin for seven generations.

He's well versed in the auctioneers' lingo and he knows the signals. Within seconds, Ida has bid for and bought the most expensive tuna at today's auction, a 450 pounder for $8,500.

Ida is the master of the house of Hicho, a wholesaler supplying Tokyo's most exclusive sushi restaurants. He wields his blades like a latter day samurai.

Like everything in Japan, cutting apart the tuna is a ceremony. The fresh bluefin is massaged and stroked as befitting a king. The masters even have what they call "Maguro No Kaiwa," conversations with the tuna. Ida appeals to the fish to make him proud and give him their best.

The demand for the freshest bluefin tuna from the world's most exclusive restaurants is insatiable. So how is this global yen for bluefin satisfied? Well, globally, from the coast of Japan, the Gulf of Maine, Mexico or the Mediterranean.

It's in the Mediterranean that the tuna come every springtime to spawn. And it's there that fishermen have been laying in wait for them for millennia. The bluefin tuna has provided protein to all the great civilizations which have sprung up on these shores.

The 60 Minutes team traveled to Sardinia, an island off the coast of Italy, and the fisherman there go after the bluefin much the same way their ancestors did during the days of the Roman empire.

Fishermen from the village of Carloforte fix nets to the ocean floor, trapping the migrating bluefin in giant chambers. The team went out with divers to check on their trap. They had no idea what to expect.

Below the surface, there are floating walls of nets stretching six stories high. There is no escape here for these juggernauts, who can cross the Atlantic at 70 miles an hour.

Within a few hours, the tuna and the fishermen would be face to face, locked in an ancient ritual called "la mattanza," which means, literally, "the slaughter."

The mattanza begins with a small armada of old boats with rusty hulls that are towed out and hauled into position surrounding the nets.

Over the course of the next two hours, the fishermen close in on their prey, bringing their boats and their nets closer and closer to each other.

It's a life-and-death struggle for the giant bluefin. The smaller fish are wrestled on board, while the larger ones have to be winched. The churning waters and the decks of the boats run red with blood.

In the end, it's hand-to-hand combat. And think of it, this bloody battle is all in the service of sushi.

When Simon and the team filmed the mattanza, it seemed like the fisherman had made an enormous catch, but the fishermen insisted that they are catching fewer fish and smaller fish than in previous years. And the situation is so bad, they say, that they don't know how long they'll be able to stay in business.

To stay afloat, this ancient ritual has been put in the service of a very modern corporate culture: all the tuna is taken to a factory ship moored a short distance away. Japanese buyers from Mitsubishi - the large industrial conglomerate best known in the U.S. for their cars - are on board, too. They pay big bucks for big bluefin, and they'd like to buy the whole catch, 600 in all. The fish are weighed and measured, and most are simply not big enough; only 54 will make the trip to Tokyo.

The rest will be sold by Giuliano Greco, who manages the mattanza, and who will send the remainder on to canneries, restaurants and sushi bars across Europe.

Greco says there are fewer tuna and that the size is smaller. "This is a big problem for us," he tells Simon.

Greco's family have been the owners of a tuna factory in Carloforte for more than 350 years. He and the others who run the few remaining mattanzas agree that their problems stem from a drastic change in the way most tuna are now caught.

In the 1990's a new vessel started fishing for tuna in the Mediterranean. It was called a "purse seiner" and it brought on a revolution in tuna fishing. Each of the vessels could encircle and trap some 3,000 bluefin in one go.

Before long, there were more 300 purse seiners working there and the new method proved so efficient that it made the mattanza look like some old relic left over from the Middle Ages.

It is high-tech fishing on an industrial scale. The purse seiners prowl the Mediterranean's spawning grounds, waiting for word from spotter planes that are patrolling overhead. When schools of bluefin come to the surface, the planes relay the coordinates to the purse seiners, who then rush to encircle them.

It's something that Roberto Mielgo has seen firsthand. He was around when purse seiners first started fishing for tuna in the Mediterranean.

"How many of these vessels are there in the Mediterranean right now?" Simon asks.

"Maybe 39 French, six Spanish. Sixty Tunisians. I would say 60 Croatians. I would say 120 Turkish. Ninety-two Italian," Mielgo explains.

Mielgo says it's a huge business and that the stakes are very high. He has seen as many as 300 tons of bluefin tuna, worth as much as $2 million, trapped inside one of these nets.

Divers open a gap and count them as they're transferred into pens the size of a football field. Tugboats then slowly drag the pens with the live tuna inside to tuna ranches.

"To me the word ranching refers to cattle," Simon remarks.

"Yes. But, you do not breed the bluefin tuna at the ranch," Mielgo explains. "You actually fatten the fish to gain up to 20 percent weight."

They feed them sardines and mackerel; they control the color and the flavor. In three to six months, the tuna will be big enough and fat enough to harvest. Ninety percent of them will go to Japan, which imports as much tuna as it can - any tuna, some half a million tons a year. Most of the tuna is blast frozen on board ships, which arrive in Japanese ports everyday.

They are stored in giant freezer rooms at a bone-chilling minus 75 degrees Fahrenheit. At any given time, there are over 60,000 tons of frozen tuna stockpiled in what some call Japan's strategic reserve.

Freezing tuna at such low temperatures has transformed what was once a fresh delicacy into a commodity, with virtually no expiration date.

The king of sushi is no longer treated like royalty. It is scraped and planed and then cut up into blocks. This tuna will make its way to supermarkets and thousands of low-end sushi restaurants, where you can eat a piece of bluefin for as little as 50 cents. The industry's ability to supply the global market with inexpensive sushi has stoked demand, and that has created a Mediterranean gold rush.

These days, Roberto Mielgo spends his time tracking fishing boats and monitoring catches. And he's found that the international quotas which limit tuna fishing are not being enforced. And those spotter planes? They're officially banned, but are still hunting tuna. Illegal fishing is rampant.

"And if this trend continues?" Simon asks.

"All I can say, is that if we carry on like this, we are bound to catastrophe. I mean, it's as simple as that. No more fish. No more industry. No more culture," Mielgo predicts.

And no more mattanza. This may well be the last year that the weary fishermen of Carloforte raise their flag, telling their village that they've had a catch. The future of fishing in the Mediterranean is no longer in their hands - it's in the hands of large fishing fleets, who are in a race to catch the last tuna.

Produced By Michael Gavshon and Drew Magratten