During my travels to Japan in October/November, I gave Gillian Ferguson, supervising producer of KCRW 89.9’s Good Food, a short tour of Tsukiji Market. She asked me a few questions about the market for a segment on Good Food, which aired January 11 and was called Inside Tsukiji Market.
I first went to Tsukiji about 30 years ago, on when of my first days in Japan. My landlady, who had a friend working in the market, woke me up in the middle of the night, and when we got there we saw rows of frozen tuna laid out on the concrete. Men with flashlights moved up and down the straight rows, inspecting the huge tuna with flashlights and writing down notes on pads. The auction went quickly, and afterward the market broke out in a frenzy as motorized carts began moving fish to wholesale stalls.
Back then, I didn’t see foreign visitors, or very many of them. When I wrote Frommer’s Japan, I decided that visiting Tsukiji Market on the very first morning in Japan made perfect sense, because everyone’s awake before dawn with jetlag anyway. I recommended eating breakfast at a hole-in-the-wall sushi stall located in the market, Sushi Dai. But over the years the number of visitors grew, prompting the tuna auctioneers to limit the auction to the first 120 visitors on a first-come, first-serve basis. The queue at Sushi Dai is so long, it takes more than an hour wait to get in there.
So now I recommend that visitors come later, when the wholesale and outer retail markets are in full swing, and there are a number of sushi restaurants both inside and out the market. In any case, Tsukiji Market is scheduled to move in 2016, to make room for the 2020 Olympics. I’ll be sorry to see it move outside the city center.
