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. [Tokyo, markets, food culture, globalization]

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On March 11, 2011, at 2:46 p.m. local time, an earthquake with an epicenter 130 kilometers east of Sendai off the Pacific coast of northern Japan shook the Tohoku region more violently than any tremor in a thousand years. The quake was approximately 9.0 in magnitude, and it in turn triggered a set of tsunami hurtling across the Pacific Ocean, striking first the coast of Tohoku with waves of unprecedented height and strength, along a coastline stretching roughly 400 kilometers. In Fukushima, 180 kilometers west-southwest of the epicenter, 15-meter waves roared over seawalls supposedly protecting a nuclear reactor built just a few meters from the ocean's edge, starting a chain of events that resulted in an explosion the following day that began the release of radioactive materials (which continues still), sparking high anxiety if not palpable panic in Tokyo, the center of which is 240 kilometers to the south-southwest of the Fukushima nuclear complex.

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Older sections of Japanese cities often are divided into well-defined neighborhoods. These are not simply bureaucratic devices (such as postal districts or police precincts) with little correspondence to the social categories and groupings important in the daily lives of most local residents. Nor are such neighborhoods merely emblems of larger social, economic, or ethnic divisions within the citysuch as a New Yorker might have in mind when referring to the West Village, Wall Street, or Williamsburg. Rather, these neighborhoods are geographically compact and spatially discrete; socially they are well-organized and cohesive, containing from several hundred to a few thousand residents. In such neighborhoods, overlapping and intertwining local organizations and institutions provide a wide array of services and sponsor myriad activities for local residents, who are also linked to one another by elaborate, enduring webs of informal social, economic, and political ties that extend throughout the neighborhood.Yet neighborhood groups and ties are often transparent or invisible to casual observers, known only to residents for whom the local services, contacts, and activities neighborhoods foster are important. They are invisible, too, because scholars rarely examine the substance and significance of neighborhood social life, and instead dismiss urban community institutions as ephemeral, regarding them either as merely the government's administrative creations or as residual products of outmoded patterns of social organization.One Tokyo neighborhood in which these transparent institutions form a vigorous and important arena for local social life is Miyamoto-ch62, where I carried out fieldwork from June 1979 to May I98I. Miyamoto-Cho is about twenty minutes by commuter train from Tokyo station in an older section of the city. A rough rectangle measuring about 200 by 400 meters, Miyamoto-ch6 contains about 2,100 residents in 930 households3; the neighborhood's population density approaches 30,000 residents per square kilometer. Its jumbled homes and apartment buildings are interspersed with about I20 small shops and 40 tiny factories, almost all of which are owned and operated as household enterprises. The neighborhood is a middle and lower-middle class community, dominated socially, politically, and commercially by the self-employed merchants and manufacturers for whom Miyamoto-ch6 is both home and workplace.This article shows that neighborhood institutions and the informal ties that crosscut and link them are not ephemeral, but crucial in the lives of many local residents. I argue that neither view of neighborhood life-as institutional invention or as static product of cultural tradition-sufficiently explains contem-