Extreme Fish Filleting at Hyper Japan

There is fish filleting and then there is Extreme Fish Filleting. This is what you do when cutting up a massive tuna for sashimi. I was invited by the lovely people at So Restaurant to witness this at the recent HyperJapan event.

My last visit to HyperJapan was a bit of a culture shock as I am not into Cosplay, Anime or Manga. This year the show has gone a bit more mainstream with more Japanese food stalls, a whole section of Sake producers, numerous Japanese prefectures and their accompanying tourist boards and a main stage with Japanese culture shows. Not so many stalls selling cosplay costumes like before and even less cosplay fans walking around in costumes offering free hugs. It was Friday so the masses might descend during the weekend.

Filleting a Yellow Fin Tuna

The Tuna Filleting was done by Chef Matsuya of the So Restaurant. He had a 45kg Yellow Fin Tuna (a sustainable fish) to cut up. It took 3 enormous knives and several  pairs of hands to get the task done.

It seems, unlike other fish, tuna is cut from the tail upwards. Every piece of the fish is used, even the bones. This 45kg fish will yield about 2000 pieces of fish for sushi. Restaurants usually buy whole tuna, cut them up and freeze them until needed and this will keep for up to a month.

We were then offered a tasting of the tuna sashimi and some premium sake courtesy of the City of Tokyo.

According to my Japanese friend, their favourite and most tasty part of the tuna is the meat that is scraped from around the bones called Nakaochi. We later had this in a bowl of rice with some pieces of tuna sashimi.

While there, I had a go on the soon to be release Wii U and their new super interactive game the Legend of Zelda Battlequest using the new Wii Gamepad. It’s a bit like virtual reality and it’s called an assymetric game as the players can move in a 360 way and not linear like the Mario games. Hours of fun.

Here are some other things on offer at Hyper Japan.