Supply-side sushi: Commodity, market, and the global city

Urban anthropology has been simultaneously challenged and transformed as forces of globalization-variously defined in economic, political, social, and cultural terms-have been theorized as "de-territorializing" many social processes and trends formerly regarded as characteristic of urban places. Against a seemingly dis-placed cityscape of global flows of capital, commerce, commodity, and culture, this paper examines the reconfiguration of spatially and temporally dispersed relationships among labor, commodities, and cultural influence within an international seafood trade that centers on Tokyo's Tsukiji seafood market, and the local specificity of both market and place within a globalized urban setting.