About 17 per cent of the world’s total fish catch passes through the market.
While the fish auction may be closed to the public, whole tunas, bought at the auction, are lined up like silver torpedoes at some stalls. Some as big as 300 kg. arrive frozen (quality is not affected by flash freezing) and fetch up to $100,000 at auction. Wholesalers carve up the tuna with bandsaws, axes and knives. And if you've never seen snake-like black eels being skinned and filleted, you will by visit’s end.
In the labyrinth of market stalls, I walk by glistening black fish heads with mouths large enough to swallow me whole. There are incredible displays and varieties of sea bream, crab, mackerel, bonito, squid, prawns, sardines, cuttlefish, slithering fresh water and sea eels, oysters and sea urchin as well as dried and preserved fish - the market handles some 400 types of seafood. I buy a beautiful box of sea urchin (uni) for about $16 Cdn.
In the surrounding outside area, some 300 shops and restaurants are crammed into rabbit warrens and offer an incredible array of vegetables, fruit, fish, pickles, sweets, cooking tools, pottery and processed goods.
Over the two visits I made to Tsukiji, I bought two large bowls, wooden sushi platters and Japanese confections. Suitcases are such cargo killjoys. I wanted to bring home so much more.
No visit to Tsukiji should end without actually eating seafood. The market area has some of the best sushi and sashimi buys as well as dirt-cheap places where market staff go for fast-food breakfast dishes like ramen, tamago (sweet omelette rolls) or tempura.
But we're pilgrims to a fresh seafood mecca, so it's sushi and sashimi for breakfast and it's made from fish bought at the market just hours before. I went with names of places to try, but trying to find an address would drive one insane. And besides, the eeny, meeny, miny, moe method of finding a restaurant worked just fine on both visits. Fish just doesn't come much fresher.
Tsukiji Market has been in its present location since 1935 and there are plans move it, by 2012, to a site almost twice the size some 2.5 km from
Source: Written by Mia Stainsby,