Tsukiji and Ginza

Thursday I woke up a bit earlier and braved rush hour on the metro to try and see Tsukiji fish market, which is one of the highlights of Tokyo. Every guidebook recommends getting up at the crack of dawn and catching the daily tuna auction, but I didn’t feel like going. When I say ‘the crack of dawn,’ I really mean it. The auction starts at 5:30, and to guarantee a spot, you really need to be there at around 4.

Anyway, I just wanted to see the market proper, so I headed out around 9, which as it turns out still wasn’t early enough to see the market in all its glory. I got to the Tsukiji stop around 10, and started meandering through the Tsukiji wholesale market, which basically sells everything but fresh fish. They’ve got spices, dried fish, street food, knives, restaurant supplies, and various other ingredients. It was really an assault on all five senses. Huge crowds crammed into tiny alleys, street food frying and grilling in stalls, touts and stall owners shouting at you to buy things, huge piles of dried shrimp, and bags of bright colored mystery powders. Picture an action movie chase scene through an Asian market, and you’re probably picturing something like the wholesale market.

I had a blast exploring the wholesale area. I got some food (azuki bean dumplings, fried squid on a stick, and a scallop grilled in its own shell), puttered about looking at the dried foods on sale (it was fun trying to guess what they were), and looking through the restaurant stores (I ended up buying a nice sashimi knife from one of one of the knife sellers). It was also the first time I’d ever seen wasabi root whole, which was cool.

Street food lunch

I apparently spent a little too much time wandering the wholesale market, as the main Tsukiji market was already closing down by the time I got there, and I got there at around 11! I didn’t get to see the stalls crammed full of fish like I’d hoped, but it was still amazing to wander around and see the market. It looked a bit like what I imagine the Kowloon Walled City looked like on the inside. REALLY narrow, dark, brick-and-cobblestone alleys that connect the brightly lit fish stalls. The ground’s perpetually wet from the run-off from the stalls, and though the market is housed in a warehouse with a fairly high ceiling, the tarps and planks that cover the stalls make it feel like the ceiling is really low.

Inside the market

Something else about Tsukiji: it attracts lots of tourists, but it is not a tourist attraction. This applies to a lot of my favorite markets in the world (like Pike Place in Seattle and La Bocqueria in Barcelona), but the target customers makes a world of difference here. People shopping at Pike Place are personal shoppers; they’re buying like a basket or two of stuff. People shopping at Tsukiji are shopping for restaurants or restaurant companies. They’re buying HUGE amounts of food. Because of this, Tsukiji is actually kinda dangerous. There’s forklifts and carts zipping about, big eighteen wheelers are driving around the loop around the market, and folks chucking boxes and crates all around. Pay attention to what you’re doing and you’ll be fine, but if you don’t you’ll get yelled at real quick. You’d be insane if you tried to bring kids here.

Look at me, all fancy and french.

I didn’t stay too long in the actual market, since things were closing down pretty quick, but it was still a lot of fun to see. After I left, I decided to see Ginza, a shopping area that makes Fifth Ave in New York look like amateur hour. Land in Ginza sells for upwards of $30,000 per square foot, and looking at the stores they’ve got here, I can believe it. I’m still not much of a fan of clothes shopping, so I grabbed a seat at a cake-and-coffee shop (couldn’t find a normal coffee shop, so I ended up going someplace way fancier than I intended) and flipped through my guidebook to see if anything caught my attention.

My weird arsty guide book suggested a sweets shop called Higashiya that takes traditional Japanese sweets and puts slight contemporary twists on them. It took me a while to find, thanks to Tokyo’s bizarre addressing system, and once I did find it, I wandered into the building next door by mistake at first. The lady in charge there was quite nice and helped me understand what all everything was. A few looked way to strange for me (the mocha mixed with sakura leaves, for example), and a few aren’t exactly what I’d qualify as ‘sweets’ (like the unsweetened rice ball sprinkled in toasted soy flour). I ended up getting a very pretty box of four sweets for around $13. The green one was a green tea ball with a sake-soaked raisin, and the date one was a honeyed date stuffed with clotted cream and a candied walnut. (I’m not sure what the other two were). They wrapped them up in a nice box,

Nom nom nom.

then put it in a bag with an icepack and told me to get it home in the next three hours.

After that, I wandered into a store called Itoya, which is an upscale Japanese stationary store. Sounds weird, but it was definitely worth a stop. There’s the normal one which is about as boring as you’d expect, but one block away there’s the ‘premium’ store, which was fascinating. The first floor is the ‘luxury pen’ store, where the cheapest pen I could find was a $150 ball point, going up to $600 and $700 fountain pens, with 18k gold nibs and hand-made lacquer bodies. Up a floor is the ‘statement piece’ pens, which were $1000 and up. It was a little insane.

If you want to get yourself some Armani or Gucci, Ginza has plenty more to offer you, but I ended my trip here. That night was my dinner at Sushi Yasuda, which is worth another post. I'll end with a very Japanese ad I saw on the way home.