A Way of Life Moves With a Market Tokyo is spending $4.5 billion to relocate the Tsukiji fish market, the world's largest, to better accommodate truck traffic. TOKYO - Each day before dawn, the world's largest fish market comes to life in frantic activity, a last holdout of an older, quainter Japan. Built in 1935, the market is also a popular tourist destination. Workers in rubber boots slosh through inch-deep water, while others dart by on motorized carts carrying plastic-foam boxes with every manner of creature that can be hauled from the sea, from dagger-shaped silver sardines and spider-like crabs to the deflated protoplasmic blobs of mysterious deep-sea predators. In one corner, auctioneers loudly hawk the huge frozen torsos of prize tuna laid in rows on the floor. Nearby, fishmongers in open-air stalls carve the tuna flesh into ruby-red bricks for sale to sushi bars and grocers. Soon it will be gone. The city is planning to spend $4.5 billion to relocate the market - nicknamed Tsukiji for the neighborhood that surrounds it - to a modern, climate-controlled distribution center on a manufactured island in three years. The move is part of a broader face-lift Tokyo is planning before the 2020 Olympics. For the many who have opposed the change, the relocation will bring not only the loss of a historic, 78-year-old marketplace, but also another blow to a vanishing way of life. Tsukiji has been a place where merchants haggled face to face, and where even the lowliest fishmonger displayed the obsession with freshness that helped Japan bring sushi to the world. Its passing is part of a broader transformation, away from the tiny mom-and-pop shops specializing in everything from tofu to rice cakes that have been increasingly replaced by big-box supermarkets and fast-food chains. Officials say they want to redevelop the market's approximately 50 acres of land - valued in the billions of dollars - into high-rise apartment buildings and a tunnel that would connect Tokyo to the islands that will house new Olympic sites. They, and many who work at the market, also say the move is necessary to keep up with changing times, as the same fast-food chains and supermarkets that have changed Tokyo's urban landscape have increasingly shunned Tsukiji as too expensive and slow. Opponents counter that the relocation is yet another example of the skewed priorities of Japan's development-happy bureaucrats, who they say want to tear down what has become one of the city's most popular tourist destinations to enrich big construction companies and real estate developers. "Tsukiji was the beating heart of the sushi culture that spread across the world," said Kazuki Kosaka, a former local assembly member who opposed the relocation. And now it will be redeveloped into condominiums. When moving Tsukiji was first proposed 14 years ago, it spurred widespread opposition, even leading to rare street protests. They were led by so-called middle wholesalers, the traditional middlemen who buy from big wholesalers and sell to restaurants and other retailers; they feared the new market would allow large corporate wholesalers to squeeze them out. In 2001, the plan appeared doomed after the discovery of toxic contaminants at the new site, which had housed a refinery for converting coal into natural gas. But city officials were undeterred, chipping away at opposition by offering subsidies to help pay for the move. Last year, the union representing the middle wholesalers, who number about 700, switched its position and came out in favor of the move, which is considered a done deal barring some last-minute reprieve. After delays, Tokyo says it is on track to complete the yearlong cleanup of the new site by March. Workers there now spend their days scraping off several feet of contaminated topsoil to replace it with clean dirt. But critics fret that the cleanup will not convince skeptics that seafood whose value lies partly in its pristineness is safe. "The Tokyo government is using the Olympics as an excuse to distract people from the contamination issue," said Makoto Nozue, 76, who has bought and sold tuna at the market for six decades. Tsukiji is a globally known brand name and a cultural treasure. Why throw this away?