Fishy fishies

July 28th, 12:00am - Tsukiji, Tokyo, Japan

"Be careful, its dangerous," warned the immaculately dressed man in white waving a sharp, sinuous knife casually in my direction. I nodded fervently, glanced down at the slimy wriggling thing on my plate, checked my watch, and realized it was going to be a long night.

My father, several times as I was growing up, took me to the pier fish market in Boston early Saturday morning (6am-7am) to watch various fish, freshly caught, brought from the boats, cut up, boxed, and shipped out to retailers and restaurants. It was not particularly hectic, and although I had never seen fish in that elemental state before, it was more of a casual Saturday than anything life changing.

Flash forward a few years to this past Sunday night/Monday morning. While in Tokyo I had long planned on visiting the largest wholesale fish market in the world, and one of the largest wholesale bazaars of any kind: The Tsukiji Fish Market. The only catch is that the market begins humming around 3am, and is not so much a casual Saturday as a frenetic buzz of motor carts, people, and fish reputed to be the final resting place of many an adventurous tourist. "Just remember," one website advised, "if it comes to saving a box of fish or a person, the vendors will choose the fish every time".

I spent the first 3 of my 4 days here in Tokyo planning on going to the market Monday morning. However for reasons that are beyond this blog, I didn't get much sleep Friday or Saturday night, and on Sunday around 11pm I was already falling asleep while moving around town. I planned on going to the market for the 3am opening, but because of the train start/stop times, if I went back to my hotel for a couple hours nap, I would have to take a cab at 2am or so (the last train from my hotel to Tsukiji was at 12am). Because cabs are obscenely expensive here, I gradually realized I'd be pulling an all-nighter on an already small amount of sleep.

Put all this together, and what do you get? An hour-by-hour blog of the whole experience, delirious from lack of sleep and overexposure to fish, brought to you by half a dozen pieces of paper I hastily grabbed from a restaurant and scribbled on throughout the morning. Here we go...

12am - Just to clarify, I swore off soda several years ago because I was trying to live a bit healthier. Since desperate times call for desperate measures, and as I was nodding off around midnight, I just bought and downed the first of several Tsukiji-based Coca-Colas. I arrived at the market area around 12:15am to overall deadness and lack of activity, but amused myself by wandering the streets and areas to get a feel for the place. A lot of sketchy people about, but what do you expect?

1am - Stroll into a sushi place for a snack and to kill some time. Its open 24 hours, like many of them around the fish market, and there are a good dozen people around in groups and pairs. People seem to be laughing and joking a lot, and eating a good amount of food for so late at night. The two sushi chefs behind the bar are constantly moving, and seem to give the orders around here. The one closest to me, Tony, speaks very good English, and we talk a bit about sushi. I mention how I ate it a lot of it growing up, and challenge him to give me whatever he can. Its probably going to be expensive, but what the hell. When will I get this chance next?

He starts me off easy with some octopus and salmon caviar, but rapidly accelerates into the "weird zone". He throws some lightly toasted horse meat my way, and then reaches into a tank of live sea creatures. He pulls out a live shrimp, chops in half in front of me, and then throws one half of it onto my plate. "Shrimp Odari," Tony explains, which turns out to mean 'Dancing Shrimp'. See why below, as I watched and Tony encourages me to eat it already.

After I consume some other interesting stuff (Abalone, octopus, clam, salmon eggs), Tony waves his sushi knife in the air and gave me his aforementioned warning about the danger of going to the fish market. I guess it isn't really meant for tourists, and hasn't made many accomodations for them. Nonetheless, I'm going to venture outside again and check it out. Pay my somewhat steep tab ($40) and hit the streets.

2am - I'm realizing that, as many people told me, the market doesn't really get busy until later on, and instead of being cool by getting there early, I'm just alone and doing a lot of walking. Crap. I retreat to a Denny's-like diner and buy the cheapest thing possible. I wait out about 30 minutes and make my way back outside. Feeling a bit tired. Realizing the battery power on my camera is inexplicably low. Dang!

Slowly the shops begin to open up, almost one by one. People arrive in cars, on bicycles, motor scooters, in groups and alone. Wearing chef's clothing and street clothing and heavy boots and shoes. Nobody says to much, but everyone begins to move, push and pull doors open, tables out, and gradually things are starting to assemble.

The way I seem to see things happening is that the big trucks arrive, and dole out their packages onto smaller, one man motor carts. These are the carts that will happily run over you and they zip with abandon down the stalls and streets of the market, bringing goods to and fro. The carts deliver the goods from the trucks to the store owners. In the end, lots of activity to get something from one place to the other.

3am - Ok, wow, the number of stores is actually getting quite impressive now. Once they start opening, you see that they stretch and stretch off into the distance.

Just watched 2 older women in the back of a small restaurant stall, through a side door. They are rolling bunches of sticky rice into balls, and then wrapping the balls in seaweed sheet sheets to make rice snacks. Its all very smooth, repeated gracefully for the 10 minutes i'm standing here.

Camera died, arg. This is going to suck. I drop into Tony's sushi place to say hello, but he is taking a nap from 3am-4am. Baby.

Wow, almost run over 3 times just now by those flying carts... a few conclusions...
A) The market is picking up
B) I'm standing in the loading area
C) I'm getting tired

Just ducked into a second sushi place for another slug of coke. Is this what work is going to be like?

4am - As I watch through a window a fish is put through an entire factory process. First its soaked and scaled, then washed. Then another guy chops it up, and passes it along until we end up with bite-sized chunks of fish in plastic bags, being placed in front of the store for sale. Pretty fresh, no?

OH MY GOD. I've found the fish market. Everything else I've said until now was actually just the retail/consumer side of an unbelievably HUGE operation. This is like a gigantic rummage sale of fresh, fishy, football-field proportions. Some of the things I'm seeing as a I walk along:

1) A tuna as big as me, fresh and on a slab a foot away
2) A basket of sea snakes alive and in bags at my feet. They jump and snap at me as I walk by, holy crap
3) Whole fish that remind me of red snappers, a vivid, blood red
4) People running, running! back and forth to get places
5) Cart operators weaving their carts backwards (!), in reverse! through the small aisles in between the stands
6) Craftsman cutting up the tuna with everything from a table-mounted buzz saw to an intricate thin knife a couple feet long. The former is used for chopping up frozen fish and the later is used by up to 3 people at a time to carefully quarter the Tuna into pieces of meat for sale. I don't know what else to say, but these tuna are huge!

I just asked one of the counter guys how expensive this tuna is. He said it was caught off Australia 3 days ago, and is 4000 yen per kilogram. To translate, thats about $90/pound. And of the hundreds of Tuna I can see in my immediate vicinity, this one has to be 150 pounds, at the very least.

5am - Just gotten my first good long look at big-game fish cutting up, and it is spectacular. In this case a swordfish, of which one piece was 8kg, and from which many more are coming one by one. The cutters are like samurai: They measure, plunge in the blade, pull it along, and then rip it out. They examine the cut, wipe the blade, and repeat. These fish are HUGE.

Ah, I've come upon some of the auction mechanism. There are gigantic freezer bays with rows and rows of fish lined up, with buyers walking among them poking and prouding. The public isn't allowed into these rooms, but I can look through the window. Lots and lots of fish. Have I said that enough?

The sun is out, when did that happen? I'm seriously swaying at this point, and realize that I still have a long walk and some subway rides home. As I'm winding my way out I find the parking lot that is jammed full of trucks, serving as the destination for lots of this fish. Where it goes from here, who knows?

Walking out, some conclusions as I sit here on a bench... These are mostly working people here, doing a long, hard job over and over each day. At least while they are here, they are generally pretty serious with moments of brief levity. There are some food stalls set up within the market to provide for food and drink for people, but nobody really seems to go there. Its pretty much continuous hours of work with very little break.

POST SCRIPT: As I tried to get home that morning, I walked to the wrong subway stop, got off at the wrong station once I got on, fell asleep a few times, and generally made a mess of myself. By the time I got back, I was the incarnation of the walking dead. I had about two hours before I had to get up and check out, and I woke up from my nap 3 hours later, stomach aching from sushi intake, feet aching from walking in sandals, wallet aching from the whole process. But was it worth it? YES! The fish market in Japan did not dissapoint, in terms of sights, sounds, smells, and experience. If you're ever in Tokyo, take a morning and go there. But maybe show up at 4am, ok? :)