My sister Sam told me that the Tokyo fish market was right near TeamLab Planets, and that if we played our cards right, we could see both the market and the interactive digital art museum on the same morning.
Sam herself hadn’t seen the market, because she’d visited TeamLab on a Wednesday when the market was closed. So I didn’t have a first hand account to work with. But deep in the recesses of my media saturated mind, I had an image of huge sumo sized Japanese men hauling tuna onto their shoulders, and perhaps lopping the odd fish head off with a samurai sword before the bloodied carcasses were loaded into the arms of the restauranteurs of Tokyo, while everyone shouted prices and expletives and prayers to the gods of overfishing.
‘Harry, do you want to go to the best fish market in the world?’ I asked him. “Before TeamLab? But we’d have to get up early.’
‘Not really’ he said. ‘I don’t love markets. I think I want to sleep in.’
I told him he was really missing out. I told him about the yelling and the blood and the tunas as big as small cars. I told him about the fat men drenched in fish guts and how this was a market he’d never forget. I set three alarms, one in the sixes and two in the sevens.
As we caught early trains the next morning, Google told us that the fish market near Team Labs was the Tsukiji Fish Market, also known as the Outer Fish Market. Had I done a little bit more research, I’d have realised that Tsukiji has about as much wholesale fish action going on as the Queen Victoria Market in Melbourne. It has stalls, that’s the long and the short of it. Some very nice stalls, and we had some lovely sashimi, but I probably would have eased up on that 6.45am alarm for the fourteen year old if I’d known what we were in for.
‘Any big fish?’ I asked one stall holder, as we steered through the retail labyrinth. Then we expanded into a bit of Google Translate led chat about how the fish come into Tokyo.
‘Ten minute taxi’ she told me. I’ve since worked out that she meant the Toyosu Market and tuna auction, the new location for the old Inner Fish market at Tsukiji, which a handful of lucky tourists can watch at 5.45 each morning. Indeed the Viator tour for that one meets at 5am, and it’s basically sitting in a viewing gallery watching business people walk clinically around the carcasses of big fish. No sumo sized men cutting off fish heads with samurai swords. No yelling. No blood. And it would have meant a 3.30am alarm.
Luckily,. Harry was happy being in a market with ‘just food’. I explained that these errors will happen when travelling, because people do make mistakes.
Just like this Tsukiji stall holder who spelled Beef with an upside down F.
Not that I’m throwing shade. My Japanese is not coming along.
Tsukiji, and thanks for all the fish