One City, Two Faces: Tsukiji Market

Posted on urbanphoto.net

Sushi Bar at Tsukiji Market, Tokyo

The hardest thing for me as a kid growing up in the vastness of suburban Tokyo was to imagine a place different from my own—I was merely one amongst the tens of millions who lived on lands far from the city centre and dominated by the postwar glass-and-concrete aesthetic, and who, via Tokyo’s impeccably efficient train system, poured into the city’s downtown (an unfamiliar and decidedly North American concept), itself a vague place to which the usual definition—anywhere within the famed Yamanote loop line—does no justice.

Life was and still is organized around single train lines: you take it to work, to shops, to the dentist’s etc. Patterns of life literally do not intersect, and one’s world at times becomes a partial reality, composed of the landscape along the morning train ride and people (often the same ones) you bump into on the train platforms and around the train stations.

Which explains why I’d been to many of the fabled sites of Tokyo for only so lamentably few times, and to some never at all; a fact, nevertheless, a sensible Japanese person would take as a matter of course. Take Tsukiji Market (so highly regarded by Lonely Planet) for example—why would a middle-class college-going kid travel to a place for fish mongers and restaurant buyers?

I went regardless, armed with a camera, an academic, collegiate curiosity, and a copy of Lonely Planet which simultaneously identified me as a gaijin and exempted me from Japanese sensibilities.

“Tsukiji” has had a relative short run as a wholesale market (it began in the 1930s), but is, despite its proximity to rarified Ginza, firmly and inextricably linked to the ancient traditions of old Edo’s shitamachi. Aptly translated as the “low city”, shitamachi was the area east of the “high city”, inhabited by lowly trades people–a place of lore that was unglamourous yet prosperous and always uninhibited and vivacious–now survived by only a few touristified pockets, including Tsukiji itself.

Yet it is a functioning market. Huge loads of fish start arriving before dawn, and go through fierce bidding by buyers in a now closed process. By seven o’clock everything has found an owner, and merchants began cutting up their spoils for retail. This is when the market kicks into full gear, as throngs of restaurant buyers arrive for provisions of the day.

Fragments of the shitamachi spirit remain: vendors disregard rules of politeness, hawking their food at the top of their lungs; the fish and meats are displayed with much less scruple than elsewhere; people push past each other uttering insincere apologies; and muddy vegetable-laden golf carts occasionally zip through the crowds, inducing short-lived panic. Also on display are some of the least trendy yet most essential food items in a Japanese kitchen: soy sauce, miso paste, pickled vegetables. The occasional hardware store provides the essentials for a Japanese restaurant.

The bizarre lurks among the mundane.

A stall selling what seems like preserved animals

Outside, crowds of people get their mid-morning fix at street-side noodle shops, many of them literally holes in the wall (although the noodles look fantastic). The business of eating is conducted standing up—all are busy working people, and few seem like tourists.

Standing in this bustle and hustle one can’t help being moved by the place’s warm inclusiveness: to get in on a piece of this place yourself you simply have to show interest in a piece of tuna or slip into one of these dark old sushi joints. This is life at its most humane. The shitamachi vendors are at once loud, unpretentious, welcoming, and show no trace of fin de siecle mawkishness—the market is to be torn down and replaced in 2008, but somehow you know this place will live.

Zut! I Just Killed Zis Zing Again

Not entirely through my own design though. A powerful earthquake off the coast of Taiwan on Boxing Day severed all internet cables between mainland East Asia with North America, and I've been virtually without internet for two weeks, that is, until now.

Entries are on the way though...