Tokyo restaurant wins prized tuna at New Year auction for 114.2 million yen and serves it up to customers

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The best part is their customers get to share the prize.

Tokyo’s Toyosu Fish Market holds a tuna auction every year of Japan’s most prized tuna, Oma Bluefin Tuna, and with bids regularly in the millions of yen range. But this year, restaurant group Onodera Group won a 238-kilogram (524.7-pound) Oma Bluefin Tuna for 114.2 million yen (roughly US$791 thousand).

Oma Bluefin Tuna is caught in the rough waters near the town of Oma, Aomori Prefecture. As the waters can be quite treacherous and it requires great skill to catch these elusive tunas that come to the surface for only a short time per year, they fetch a high price among tuna lovers.

114.2 million yen may seem like a steep price, but it pales in comparison to the top bid for a 278-kilogram Oma Bluefin Tuna in 2019, which went for 333.6 million yen. It is, however, the first prize over 100 million yen since the coronavirus pandemic, signaling a promising comeback for the tuna industry.

▼ Ginza Onodera Sushi in Tokyo was one of the restaurants to receive a portion of the fish.

Along with helping provide school lunches, owning a nursing home, and offering human resources services, Onodera Group runs a chain of sushi restaurants. It’s at these restaurants that the Oma Tuna will be prepared and served to lucky customers who can get there before it sells out.

▼If you’re in Kyoto, you may be able to find it at the Kyoto branch of Ginza Onodera Kaiten-zushi.

Onodera Group will also be gifting some tuna to residents of their nursing home, and small cuts will be auctioned off at some of their school lunch offices. Perhaps the most heartwarming part of all of this, though, is that a portion of profits made from serving the tuna will be donated to disaster relief funds for the recent Great Noto Earthquake in Japan’s Toyama Prefecture. So you can fill your stomach with delicious tuna while helping out those in need!

Source and images: PR Times
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