Jiro Dreams of Sushi: Tsukiji and beyond

Tsukiji Fish Market

On my third day in Tokyo I woke up at around 3:30. This was my chance to visit Tsukiji and take the tour—I guess jet lag is good for some things, especially for non-morning people like me.

It will seem strange to many that the subways in Tokyo do not run 24 hours per day. Instead, the lines close around midnight and open around 5:00. As you need to get in line for Tsukiji tickets before they start giving out vests at 5:00, you can't use public transit to get to Tsukiji.

I ended up walking from Asakusa to Tsukiji. According to Google, it's about a 6km walk, taking 1:15. Taxis in Tokyo are hugely expensive, and I like walking, so this was OK with me.

Interesting design next to a koban (police box) on the walk to Tsukiji.

I was feeling a little nervous as I got close to the entrance, as it was after 4:30 and I was afraid I would be too late to secure a place. It turns out that I was fine, as there were only about 40 or 50 people lined up ahead of me in front of the entrance gates.

At about 5:00 they let you into a waiting room, and herd you into two lines. Each line gets a different coloured vest, corresponding to the two sequential tours they let in. When I went they let in 150 tourists per day, but that has been scaled back to 120 tourists per day. Although this may make it more difficult to get a spot, it probably helps the experience since my group was very cramped inside the Tuna auction area.

The Tuna auctions may or may not be what you expect. Basically, what you see is a bunch of frozen Tuna sitting on the concrete floor of a nondescript warehouse (contrary to popular belief, almost all tuna is frozen—even in Japan—while in the US it's actually illegal to sell sushi fish that hasn't been frozen). The tails of the tuna are cut, and buyers walk around with metal hooks to lift up the tuna and explore their flesh. There is no commentary or explanation, so you don't really know what they are looking for. You will see a few auctions but in all honesty it's impossible to see who is bidding on what, or how much is being bid. All of this will be seen from a narrow viewing area jammed with tourists, all of whom are intent on taking pictures and jockeying for viewing positions. After waiting 20 years for this experience, it was a bit of a disappointment.

On the way to the auction building, looking northwest towards the J-Power building's orange and white antenna.

Taking a break outside the auction rooms.

The auction room.

Inspect before you bid.

 Green-vested tourists watch an auction.

An auction in progress.

Once the tuna auction tour is done (it takes maybe 20 minutes), you're let loose on the market grounds. You can't visit the wholesale areas until 9:00—about two and a half hours later—so most people go to one of the sushi shops located near the west entrance. These have limited menus in English and maybe a couple of other languages, and you can also buy sashimi fish in plastic containers, too.

Multiple languages? How un-Japanese.

There are rows of tourist restaurants near the west entrance. These are some of the cheaper tourist restaurants.

A row of classier restaurants.

Less-touristy restaurant near the north entrance.

Freshly-bought tuna being broken down by band-saw in the wholesale area.

After being broken down.

The rare non-frozen tuna are broken down by blade.

Tuna parts.

Most of what you see in the wholesale area is (frozen) tuna, but you do see some other seafood, too. It's not that exciting, though.

The wholesale market.

Prepared octopus.

 Live squid.

Fruits and vegetables are sold in other areas of the market. The wholesale vegetable section was less interesting than this retail stall, unless you like looking at boxes of produce.

One stylish homeless dude lounging near Tsukiji.

The verdict

In all honesty, Tsukiji is pretty over-rated. You don't see that much during the early-morning auctions, unless you like to see a lot of frozen fish. In my opinion, there are many other fish markets that are much more interesting. For example, the Jagalchi fish market in Busan and the Aberdeen market in Hong Kong both offer a much wider variety of live fish. Heck, even the Rialto Market in Venice will be more interesting to most people. And just about any wet market that caters to the retail market (as opposed to the wholesale trade market) will have a much wider variety of fresh fish (and other comestibles, from meats to vegetables) for sale.

On the other hand, if you don't mind getting up early in the morning and making your way down there, there's no real reason not to visit Tsukiji. It's free, the auction occurs so early that it won't interfere with anything else you're planning to do that day, and even if you stay until the rest of the market opens to the public at 9:00, you'll still be done by 10:00. So there's no reason not to do it, just don't have extravagant hopes, and don't beat yourself up if you aren't able to see it.

A couple of helpful links for planning a Tsukiji visit:
http://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3021.html
http://tokyocheapo.com/entertainment/9-things-you-should-know-before-visiting-the-tsukiji-fish-market-tuna-auction/http://tokyocheapo.com/entertainment/9-things-you-should-know-before-visiting-the-tsukiji-fish-market-tuna-auction/

Ueno Park

Ueno Park is home to the National Museum of Western Art as well as a large pond which is sometimes full of lotuses. I entered Ueno Park from the east, and after walking around a bit I suddenly knew the if I went down a courtyard and turned left, I would see Rodin's Gates of Hell. And so I did. It's a very weird feeling to have that sense of familiarity. It was also a little saddening to realize how much more pleasure I took in the experience twenty years ago. Of course, that was my first real experience outside of North America, and my first experience of relatively independent travel (my grandmother wasn't very mobile, even then, so I went to most places by myself), but in many ways it's much harder to impress me now.

The Gates of Hell

The Thinker

Hercules the Archer

Akihabara

South of Ueno Park is Akihabara, the famous otaku (geek) enclave where you can find maid cafes, shops full of manga, and all sorts of things we would associate with weird Japanese culture. Of course, this also means a lot of pornography.

Japan's approach to porn is very weird. On the one hand, they censor depictions of genitals, pixellating them out. On the other hand, a lot of their porn is very hardcore and very weird. In part, I suspect that they sexualize a lot of thing (like tentacle porn) precisely because of the prohibitions on more straightforward sex—a penis in the vagina must be censored, but a tentacle in the ass is just fine.

More problematic is the public acceptance of the intense sexualization of children, and even infants. You can go into any convenience store and find magazines dedicated to showing overdeveloped 13-year-olds in tiny bikinis, with both their age and cup size prominently advertised. In Akihabara you can find DVDs of pre-pubescent models in bikinis, conveniently located in the non-porn section. I realize there is a certain amount of hypocrisy in my saying this, as it is the West and not Japan that has normalized hairless pudenda and while sharing the Japanese fetishization of schoolgirl uniforms, but Japan goes beyond the pale when you can find manga showing toddlers and babies being penetrated and sexually abused. Despite the widespread nature of this kind of imagery, however, Japanese politicians, police, and experts always describe themselves as confounded when real-life cases of sexual abuse come to light. When I lived there, there was a case where a pedophile who had been in jail was released, and promptly re-offended. When asked why he didn't receive any treatment for pedophilia while in jail, the answer was that Japan doesn't have any experience with that kind of problem, so they didn't know how to treat it (or even diagnose it).

Maid advertising for a cafe.

Students go shopping.

Underneath the Chuo-Sobu train line as it leaves Akihabara station.

A Barbie-doll-size masturbator: the Dollho. Nothing weird about that.

Pre-pubescent girls in bikinis. Seems legit.

A dog waits outside for its owner. Dogs in Japan pay not attention to strangers, even if you bend down to pet them.

Trains are expensive: I'm taking the bus

 As I said earlier, trains are expensive in Japan. A ticket from Tokyo to Kyoto would be ¥13,720—about $140, at the time. Instead, I decided to take an overnight JR bus. JR buses have the convenience of departing and arriving at train stations, there are frequent departures, and I hoped that I would be able to sleep overnight. The bus ticket from Tokyo station to Kyoto station was ¥8,100, and if you factor in saving a night's accommodation, then it's less than half the price of taking the train. The bus was fairly full, but the experience was fairly pleasant and I was able to sleep pretty well. I'm not aware that we made any stops on the way to Kyoto.

JR isn't the cheapest bus service, and it probably isn't the best, either. There's a private bus company called Willer Express that offers service along the same route from around ¥4,600. I used them on my Osaka-Hiroshima trip and was very pleased.

Tokyo Story

Tokyo Story is perhaps the greatest movie ever made (it certainly has the backing of a spectrum of renowned directors). It's a deceptively simple, timeless story of an elderly couple who travels to Tokyo to visit their children in bustling post-war Japan, only to find their children occupied with the demands of their own jobs and families. But there is no bitterness or rancor, just acceptance and resignation, and the movie pulls off the difficult task of questioning the modern rat race while simultaneously suffusing the audience with warmth and grace. And it does this in a way that isn't boring or dull the way some art-house films are.

And unlike a number of other critically-acclaimed films, Tokyo Story's reputation isn't built on bare imagery or technical innovation (think 2001 or Citizen Kane) but on universally-identifiable emotions—so many films today make little emotional sense, even on the rare occasions when they actually attempt to.

Asakusa

Asakusa is a popular tourist and entertainment hub, with lots of cheap hostels and guesthouses in the area. It's centered around the Senso-in temple, which has a huge paper lantern under a gate, followed by an arcade of souvenir shops culminating in the temple proper. It's always busy and popular with kids on school trips—fun, in an amusement-park kind of way. 

Most of the hostels are across the river, in a quieter neighborhood.

The other main attraction is the nearby kitchen district centered on Kappabashi street. It's one of the best places to see and buy the ubiquitous plastic sample-food that you often see displayed at restaurants. It's a great place for window shopping, and you can also buy some small and inexpensive (but pretty low quality) souvenir sample-food keychains, fridge magnets, and the like.

Philippe Starck's Asahi Beer Hall on the right and the Skytree on the left, as seen from across the Sumida river.

Souvenir arcade leading to the temple.

Everyone likes having having their pictures taken next to the giant lanterns. These girls are doing it better than most, especially since the default Japanese pose is to simply flash the peace sign next to one's face.

Yay!

 Another gate and lantern at the end of the arcade.

Incense burns in front of the temple. This is why you don't stick chopsticks in rice: it looks like incense, such incense is used mainly at Buddhist temples (note the swastika, which is a Buddhist symbol), and in Japanese culture Buddhit temples and rites are strongly associated with death and funerals (while celebrations and marriages are more strongly associated with Shinto rites).

Pagoda.

Five-story pagoda (or gojunoto) next to Sensoji temple.

Plastic sample food in Kappabashi.

I walked to Ginza to visit the Sanrio store—a friend loves My Little Twin Stars and I wanted to see if they had anything she might like. Ginza is notoriously expensive, and one symptom of that might be this incredibly stylish older lady I saw crossing the street outside a department store.

A new (and welcome) twist on "blue-haired granny."

No translation necessary.

Tokyo Tower from a park.

Tokyo Tower, which remains the second-tallest structure in Japan after the Skytree.

Darth Vader meets Stasi: the incredibly oppressive NOA building not far from Tokyo Tower.

I headed back to Asakusa at night to take some twilight pictures of the Sky Tree set against a lantern-lit, restaurant-filled street. A lot of what I do when I travel is motivated by photography, which is both good and bad. I think that it makes me look at things more closely, but on the other hand I suspect it also means that I dismiss things too easily if they're not photogenic, and I definitely know that I will hang around some place for longer than necessary just to wait for a good moment.

Restaurant street in Asakusa.

Skytree as viewed down a lantern-lit street.

He knows the loneliness of the single diner.

Police and security are deployed in force to deal with the threat of a couple of homeless men camping in a shopping arcade. Homelessness has been a growing problem in Japan ever since the '90s downturn, but most homeless are largely invisible to society as they live in tidy, semi-permanent squatter camps in the less-trafficked areas of public parks.

Skytree and Asahi building by night.

The outer gate and lantern at Sensoji: view from the street.

These Boots are Made for Walking: day one in Tokyo

I taught English in Japan for a couple of years, so I felt a certain sense of nostalgia on arriving in Tokyo. The smell of food cooking and frying, the humidity and feeling of the air, the orderliness of everything, the sounds of announcements: all of these things are barely perceptible in everyday life, but they hit you like a wall of familiarity when you return.

One thing that wasn't familiar was the train employee stationed next to the ticket machine at Narita, who spoke English and was there to help people buy their tickets. In my time in Tokyo I would come to see that a lot more people seem to speak English than they do in more rural Japan or the Kansai region (Kobe, Osaka, Kyoto, and environs). I bought the cheapest ticket from Narita to Asakusa, where my hostel was. This involved changing trains and taking the regular commuter line, but only cost ¥1,200 as opposed to the ¥2,500 or so that it would have cost to take the express train.
 
I arrived in Asakusa at around 10:00 pm. I usually don't have much jet lag when I travel, in either direction, because I can sleep on planes and my sleep schedule is often unsettled. I ended up waking up at around 4:00 in the morning, however, and decided that this would provide a good opportunity to visit the renowned Tsukiji fish market.

Although I had lived in Japan before, I didn't actually see all that much of Japan when I lived there, as the cost of transportation is too high to travel very far during the weekends (a Shinkansen trip from Osaka to Tokyo is about $150 each way); most of my experience in Tokyo comes from when I visited the country in 1993 with my grandmother. And in 1993 I didn't visit Tsukiji—even though I had wanted to—because as a teenager I felt that I would be out of place and in the way during the commercial auctions that Tsukiji is famous for. Ugly Western tourists who really have interfered with both the auctions and the wholesale have resulted in the current situation: in order to see the Tuna auctions you have to queue up and get tickets for a tour, and you can't visit the wholesale market before 9:00, when most business has already been conducted.

Welcome to Japan: on the morning train to Tsukiji.

Tsukiji to Setagaya

I arrived at Tsukiji to find out that it was closed (I should have checked the schedule, I guess). I wouldn't have been there early enough to take the tour, anyway, but I couldn't even see the market.  Instead I wandered around the area for a little, stopped at a nearby 7-Eleven to get some of the snack foods I had missed (there are some great Pizza chips in Japan), then headed to a nearby Yoshinoya for a similarly missed beef bowl.

The market's riverside port.

Saying hello to old friends.

I then decided to head to the Imperial Palace. It was really surprising how well I remembered it, despite it being almost 20 years since I had been there. I often knew where things should be, and what I would see around the corner. It was kind of eerie at times.

 

Palace grounds.

This is Japan.