Frozen at sea

Distant-water longline vessels leave here and do not come back for as long as twelve months. They fish across the world's oceans, and the fish are frozen almost immediately at around −60°C — far colder than a domestic freezer, cold enough to stop the cellular damage that ruins texture.

That is the whole technology. A tuna frozen at −60 and thawed properly is closer to fresh than most people assume, and it is why "frozen" is not an insult in this trade.

Why here

Suruga Bay is the deepest bay in Japan — over 2,500 metres — which means large vessels can come close in. Shimizu had the harbour, then built the cold-storage capacity, and the industry concentrated around it. Shizuoka Prefecture handles a very large share of Japan's tuna, and much of the country's canning and processing sits nearby.

A crew leaves Shimizu and returns a year later. That is the actual working life behind the bowl you are about to eat.

What to order, and how to read a menu

Maguro is bluefin, bigeye or yellowfin. The cuts matter more than the species: akami is the lean red flesh, chutoro the medium-fatty belly, otoro the fattiest and most expensive.

The local move is a maguro-don — a bowl of sliced tuna over rice, often mixing cuts — at Kashi-no-Ichi, the market beside the pier. It is fishmonger pricing, and a bowl that would be a special occasion in Tokyo is a normal lunch here.

Also look for negitoro (scraped fatty tuna with spring onion), kama (the collar, grilled — cheap and superb) and tuna cutlet, which sounds wrong and is a Shizuoka thing.

Sakura ebi, the other thing

Suruga Bay is the only place in Japan where sakura ebi — tiny translucent pink shrimp — are commercially fished, in two short seasons in spring and autumn. They are eaten raw, boiled, or sun-dried on gravel banks along the coast in a spectacle the region photographs constantly.

They also make shirasu — whitebait — worth eating here, raw if the boats have been out.