Oma Tuna

Oma is the northern tip of Honshu, a small town on the Tsugaru Strait, and its tuna sells for more than any other tuna in Japan — the record at the Tokyo New Year auction has passed three hundred million yen for a single fish. What makes them worth it is the strait: cold, violently tidal, and full of squid and mackerel, so the bluefin that pass through in autumn on the way south are enormous and fat.

The other half of the story is how they are caught. Oma fishermen use ippon-zuri, single-line pole fishing, one man in a small boat playing one fish for hours. The town is built on it. At Cape Oma, where the road ends, several restaurants run by fishing families serve the catch straight — a three-colour bowl of otoro, chutoro and akami for around ¥3,960, which sounds expensive until you consider what the same fish costs in Tokyo.

The single-line method itself is central to why Oma tuna commands such prices, and it is worth understanding as more than a marketing detail. A pole-and-line fisherman fighting one large bluefin alone in a small boat can spend hours bringing in a single catch, compared to the net methods used elsewhere that land many fish quickly but with more bruising and stress to the flesh, which affects both texture and flavor. Oma's fishing fleet is small and largely family-run, passed down through generations who have fished this same stretch of strait, and the town's identity is inseparable from the trade — flags and banners around the harbor reference tuna, and the winter auction results are followed locally the way other towns might follow a sports season. The strait's currents, driven by the meeting of warm and cold water between the Sea of Japan and the Pacific, are what concentrate the baitfish that fatten the migrating bluefin, and the same currents make the fishing itself genuinely dangerous, adding to the sense that what ends up on the plate at Cape Oma represents real, physically demanding work rather than a simple commodity catch.