Most Tokyo must-do lists online suggest the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market, otherwise known as Tsukiji fish market. It’s famous for being the world’s biggest fish and seafood wholesale market. The fish is so fresh, they come off boats and are whizzed to Tsukiji before dawn, where they are then set up for sale or auction. We arrived as early as we could, around 530am and other gaijin (foreigners) must have got the same memo because they were out in full force, all of us making ourselves present at the most inconvenient hour.
By that time, the whole place is almost wholly set up, the frozen tuna auctions that we could only watch from a distance wrapping up, so we started to explore. Lingering around any one area is almost impossible because of the minimal space between stalls, the carts and delivery vehicles and the slow but steady influx of local buyers, so you must look, buy and walk.
If you ever get to go, watch out for the weird delivery vehicles. They drive these whirring things around at break neck speed and there’s plenty of them, all making hasty deliveries with zero acknowledgement of laymen present but there were no casualties, although despite my current-words-to-live-by ‘DEATH IS NOT AN OPTION’, I felt like I was close to being run over atleast four times. Nothing like being scared shitless first thing in the morning.
The vast quantities of fresh fish and seafood and this place that runs like clockwork are all a little awe inspiring. They have almost everything you can imagine in the ocean, in polystyrene boxes out of it, so fresh, you can’t even smell it and some of it even alive. I saw sea urchins, all sorts of shellfish, lobster and crab, salmon, squid, tuna, octopus, swordfish, oh crap I’m not very good at naming sea creatures, sardines, umm. It ranges from the affordable to the expensive to the outrageous, and I wanted to buy some but settled on walking to the shops outside, to jogai shijo (outer market) and had some prepared for me instead.
