Travel blog: Tsukiji edition

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I’m way behind in my writing duties and the trip is almost over but I had to skip ahead and send out a “special edition”, mostly because I’m just so jazzed about the morning’s events. So strap in tight kids, ‘cuz here we go.
We got up at 3:45 this morning to do something I knew I wanted to do from the second we set our plans to visit Japan. If you’re a fan of food, seafood especially, every time you thank Neptune for the bounty of tasty little critters he set to swim, slither, and crawl through the waters, you should face towards Japan, towards Tsukiji. A third of the world’s seafood is consumed by Japan, and most of it comes through Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo before making its way to anyone’s chopsticks. It’s a food lovers Mecca and is turning into an ever increasing tourist attraction to ridiculous foodies willing to wake up at the butt-crack of dawn to look at fish, but what fish! Every imaginable aqua-critter, and even a few that defy the imagination, can be found in its maze of stalls and styrofoam boxes. So why get up at such an insane hour to peep some fish? In a word, Tuna. If you love sushi, chances are you love this velvety, tender, non-fishy, fish whose shades of pink and red are enough to make the most stoic drool on themselves (served, preferably, with just enough of a dab of Wasabi to make the back of your neck sweat) Tsukiji’s famous Tuna auction features the best quality and the highest recorded prices found anywhere, the problem is, it begins at 5:30 am. Still, you’re asking, “who freakin’ cares?” I didn’t know either, I was just in it to tour the sheer number and variety of seafood that couldn’t be found anywhere else but everyone told me I had to see the auctions, and so I went. Damn, I’m glad I did.
My sister-in-law, Mayumi, lives in the heart of Tokyo so we decided to spend the night at her flat and visit Tsukiji from there. That early in the morning the Tokyo Metro doesn’t run and the thought of getting up an hour earlier so Mr. Suzuki could schlep us there from Chiba wasn’t that appealing to anyone. So we caught a cab and headed in. It was easy to tell we were getting close since every spare inch surrounding the market was taken up with parked delivery trucks waiting to load up and get a hungry city of 13 million its food. My first impression of the place turned out to be dead on, it was huge, it was absolute chaos, and it was a place not meant for tourists, but we, intrepid food nerds that we are, headed in anyway. One had to be immediately on their guard, this fast moving chaos was a working market where getting product from point A to point B as quick as possible was life. It felt, as close as I can imagine it, like combat photography. Watch your ass, stick, move, get the shot, don’t stand in one place for more than a few seconds ‘cuz you’re in someone’s way. In the narrow allies lined with stalls, if the speeding dollies don’t get you, the brusque looking guy with the longshoreman’s hook might. That said, we did good, we made our way to the auction room with nary a scratch and waited with a handful of others for it to start. This too was not a place meant for goofy gawkers and I imagine they were being generous when they provided the three foot wide roped lane for visitors amidst the basketball court sized auction floor. All around us were the frozen corpses of Tuna shipped in from all over the world, arranged by size with the smaller fish at one end and the mammoth big-daddies at the other. They had been gutted, gills and tail removed, and flash frozen aboard the ships that caught them. Now, marked with their lot numbers, they were being inspected by potential bidders for the quality of their meat and fat content. A notch at the tail had been cut using a special knife so it could be pulled back and inspected. Bidders were traveling around, hacking out a sliver, warming it up from freezing and rubbing it between their fingers. We were one of the first into the visitors area and I imagined we were of just a few odds ones who were interested in this but as time went by, the visitors area began to fill up until we were shoe horned in against one another. A helpless looking security guard walked around us carrying a sign in English saying that we were to stay for five to ten minutes and then leave, making room for other visitors. Neither we, nor the other visitors had any intention of leaving before the festivities began. At 5:30 one auctioneer began to clang his bell, then another, and another and suddenly they were off, firing off prices and lot numbers in rapid-fire Japanese. It was, however incredible to listen to. With the lead in from the bells and the rhythm of the auctioneers calls, to me it sounded like a hectic vocal jazz riff. Throw a drum in the background it would have been record worthy. Not understanding the language, it sounded like the improvisational Jazz style known as scat and just begged for a beat. The first to be auctioned off were the smaller Tuna. Checking with Mayumi and my wife, I found out that prices like 65 and 70 were being thrown around. That’s in thousands of Yen and is around $650 to $700 U.S. The big boys go for much more with a record being set several months ago for $100,000 being paid for one fish. Twelve or fifteen lots into it and we decided to work our way out and let some others in to see. We got a much better idea as to how many silly people line up to see fish sold as we left. The line was backed up several hundred feet beyond the door to the visitors area. Watching our steps and each other’s backs we headed into the maze of stalls, dodging dollies and workers every few seconds, to see what we could find. It really was a veritable wonderland of seafood with every fish I’d ever heard of, so many others whose name I didn’t know, and things I had never laid eyes on. Like Uni? (sea urchin roe) By the cartload. Scallops? How about ones three inches across and still in their shell? Like that fish fresh? This one’s still putting up a fight. How about something from half way across the planet? That guy’s got two and that other guy over there is selling it for 500 Yen less. My camera was slung over one shoulder, rifle style, coming up every few seconds and ready for whatever waited around the corner or could be found in the next Styrofoam container, all while trying to keep my tourist ass from getting run over. Butchers specializing in Tuna wielded enormous knives to carve and dress fish we’d just seen auctioned minutes earlier and still other merchants heated breakfast over a hibachi while they oversaw their wares.
When we’d finally seen the world’s sea life we decided to leave the hustle and find food, we were, by now, all starving…but it wasn’t that easy. Where do you think the freshest and best sushi is served? Why, within sight of the largest fish market in the world of course, and we weren’t the only ones who knew it. Across from the main fish market, parallel alleys filled with hawkers and postage stamp sized sushi restaurants sit with access to an incredible selection and many are pretty damn famous, at least locally. By the time we found them, there were already lines formed to get into several with a few that had a wait time of up to three hours…and it wasn’t even 6:30 a.m. yet. With hefty lines in front of some and others empty, we figured the lines were a reasonable endorsement of where to eat. We picked a line that didn’t make us cringe and jumped in it. We had about a 30 minute wait and we chose our meals from the posted menu. It had been written in English but I stumbled over a phrase that painted a fairly absurd mental picture, eventually realizing that “my house is no Salmon” meant that this sushi house didn’t serve salmon. The wait was well worth it and we were soon tucking into the freshest and best Tuna and Uni I’ve ever had. Rolling out to let the other eager customers in we were sated and extremely happy with an incredible highlight to an already amazing trip.
My next post will be the last for the trip and I’ll try and sum up all that I missed since last time. I may have to post it from back in the states. Hope everybody enjoyed.

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