Bluefin tuna fetches record £254,000 at Tokyo auction

A bluefin tuna fetched a record 32.49m yen (£254,000) today at the first auction of the year at Tsukiji market in Tokyo, but the fish's growing popularity across Asia has raised fears it will soon be fished into commercial extinction.

The 342kg tuna easily beat the previous record, set exactly 10 years ago when a 202kg fish fetched 20.2m yen.

Market officials are accustomed to seeing prices rise during the new year auction at Tsukiji, the world's biggest fish market, but today's winning bid was unexpected.

"It was an exceptionally large fish," said a Tsukiji spokesman, Yutaka Hasegawa. "But we were all surprised by the price."

The tuna, one of more than 500 shipped in from around the world, will be divided between two sushi restaurants – one in Tokyo the other in Hong Kong – which joined forces at the dawn auction for the third year in a row.

Ricky Cheng, the owner of the Hong Kong restaurant, said: "Good tuna is really selling to people in Hong Kong and China, and this is a really good fish."

The joint bid reflects the growing popularity of bluefin tuna in other parts of Asia, particularly China, and adds to concerns that surging demand means its days could be numbered.

"The custom of eating raw fish is spreading throughout the world, so that it's no longer an era where Japan is consuming all of the limited supply of tuna," an auction manager said.

Japan consumes about 80% of Pacific and Atlantic bluefin tuna, and has been accused of stifling international attempts to dramatically reduce fishing quotas or ban the trade altogether.

In November, the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas (ICCAT) agreed to cut the bluefin catch quota in the Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic from 13,500 to 12,900 tonnes, a reduction that fell well short of demands by conservation groups.

In a report released last year, the WWF warned that if fishing continued at current rates, the Atlantic bluefin would be "functionally extinct" in three years.

After the ICCAT meeting, Oliver Knowles, Greenpeace oceans campaigner, said "the word 'conservation' should be removed from ICCAT's name".

Bluefin's popularity in Japan, where it is eaten raw as sushi or sashimi, shows no sign of abating. The Japanese eat about 600,000 tons of tuna annually and awareness of sustainable fishing remains low.

Top-grade otoro – the fattiest cut of tuna – can sell for as much as 2,000 yen (£16) a piece at exclusive Tokyo restaurants. The flesh on today's record-breaking tuna will go for 95,000 yen (£740) a kilo.

The tuna auctioned today's was caught using the longline method off the coast of Toi in Hokkaido, Japan's northernmost prefecture.

In previous years, bluefin fetching the highest bids have been caught using the more sustainable pole-and-line method in Oma on the northern tip of Japan's main island, Honshu.