Thursday at Tsukiji market and Ginza
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Tsukiji Market: Sushi Dai
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So this is the big day for the Sushi lovers, a pilgrimage to the Tsukiji Fish Market.
Tsukiji Central Market actually has 2 sections: one for fish, and the other for vegetables. However most tourists come to the market for one reason only: see the fish and eat the fish.
As with any religion, it's not a pilgrimage if it's too easy.
So the first obstacle to overcome: time. The market opens since 5 AM, so consider this day your day in the barack, set the clock to string you up very early, in our case 4am. However we were so excited that we're already up by 3:30AM. Without breakfast, we got out of the door by 4:35AM. meaning we would miss the tuna auction, which is fine by us, we're more interested in the market and eating sushi.
Ah, eating raw fish in the morning for breakfast, could you imagine? Sushi Dai opens its door at 5AM and closes at 2PM. By this standard, we're already late.
Having scoped out the steps the day before, we headed straight to the ticket machine and bought 2 all-day passes for the day. It's almost 5AM.
The Toei Oedo line looks like the number 6 flipped on its side, and the loop doesn't close at Tocho-mae station. We was not aware of this little important detail when poring over the metro map earlier, so at the platform we were a bit confused as to which train we should get on. A chat with a young couple at the platform clarified the issue. The train left Shinjuku at 5:12am and it deposited us at Tsukiji-shijo station at 5:44am, so the ride took a bit more than half an hour.
As soon as we stepped off the train, we knew we're at the right place: tourists were the majority in the station. Before we left home for this vacation I already spent hours studying the Google map of this area and hunted down the exact location of Sushi Dai in this maze of a market, so I knew we needed to exit through gate A1. Emerging from the station, it's already daylight. We turned left, walked a few yards and the market was right there on the left. There was no gate exactly, just roads criss crossing through the market for the truckers to take their shipments to their destinations.
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I've decided for us the night before that we would skip the tuna auction and went straight to Sushi Dai for breakfast, then visit the retail market.
Having known the approximate location of the shop thanks to this Google map, we located Sushi Dai without difficulty. There was already a line of about 12 people in front of the shop. We stood in line and looked at the clock: 6 AM. Based on reviews I read before, at 6 AM the wait should be about half an hour. Indeed it was about half an hour give or take. And that's also the reason we skipped the tuna auction, we didn't want to wait longer, and after all the main reason to be here was to sample the sushi.
When we stood in line, we saw that Daiwa Sushi had no line. While I stood in line, my wife ran over there and told me that Daiwa Sushi had double the seating capability of Sushi Dai so more people could get in, and there were 2 seats left over there. However we stuck with Sushi Dai as it's the more famous one. A couple in front of us decided to moved over to Daiwa and got right in. After that both places got lines in front of them. While waiting, some folks walked by apparently looking for Sushi Dai but couldn't read Kanji so they asked us whether this was the one. So this was in my Tips section: if you wanted to eat at a restaurant, at least learn how its name is written.
There was a lady in charge of the line, she took down the orders for the next folks in line to save time. The menu was posted on the door. We both went with the omakase which also let us pick 1 favorite nigiri.
The sushi breakfast went great, the 3 chefs were cheerful and offered apologies that we had to wait (we didn't mind  , really) and the eaters include both japanese and non-japanese. The sushi were served directly on the counter and they were all very fresh. They would tell us when something was not supposed to eat with soy sauce. Everything was straightforward and open. It's here that we tasted the kinmedai (meat was sweet) and akagai (a type of pink meat clam) for the first time. The uni was amazing, the otoro and toro both excellent. Then anago (see eel) came up. We were also served some kind of tiny white shrimp that I forgot the name. My wife was getting ippai (full) towards the end so she passed to me the rolled egg (tamago), however she couldn't resist to order an oyster dashed with soyu in addition to the extra nigiri. Then we remembered we haven't tried the tako (octopus) as sushi, so we both ordered one.
Gochisosamadeshita!
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The feast lasted about 30 minutes. The lines at both places now ballooned considerably, I wouldn't be surprised if the wait grew to an hour by the time we left. About an hour later when we were wandering about looking at the stuffs to buy, we stumbled on a line of people standing in the morning sun on the sidewalk and I told my wife, I didn't know there were group tours here. But when my wife looked closely, she rolled her eyes and told me that's actually the line for Sushi Dai. Oh my goodness!!! That's true, the line by then had wrapped around the corner. Poor folks.
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Tsukiji Market: vegetable and fish markets
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There was a posted map of the sections of the market, but the funny thing was that this map was posted on a part of the street where no one in their usual approach to the market would see it.We stumbled on it only when getting lost in the vegetables section. So use this map so you don't waste time finding what you wanted to get to.
We walked through the produce section, through the delivery areas, dodging trucks along the way, before reaching the marine product section. It took us only seconds before we realized how huge this fish market was! My wife kept exclaiming in excitement going from stalls to stalls. It's as if the whole world's ocean fish population had representatives here. I jokingly said that if there was Hell for fish, this had to be it! To see for yourself, browse these photos starting with this one and just click Next.
Having updated our knowledge of fish here, we bought 3 types of fish cake for dinner tonight, and moved to the shopping phase: checked out the cookware and utensils sections, bought some genmaicha and matcha, plus bonito. Since it's matsutake mushroom season, I talked to a mushroom shop owner to find out how the market could provide enough to satisfy the Japanese population. The answer was not surprising: they imported the mushrooms from all over, and he pointed to me a box imported from Canada, as the high quality domestic production costs hundreds of thousands of yen. I knew that here in Washington state we do have matsutake, so I considered myself lucky that I could get that thing without having to go overseas.
We have never seen such a huge central market anywhere in the world, with such a wide varieties of products especially marine products. We didn't even cover half of the market this day. I felt a deep pity for ourselves with such limited selections here in Seattle, and we lived close to the ocean! Seattle fish market isn't even worth mentioning now that we've seen this one.
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We left Tsukiji about 9AM, after spending a total 3 hours there. I vaguely remembered that close by there was a boardwalk, but I could find it, and my limited Japanese could not explain enough to people I asked. So we abandoned that idea and instead went back to Shinjuku. My wife went shopping in Takashimaya while I ran home for a quick shower and change.
We met up about 1pm and went to Ginza-ichome station for lunch at Gonpachi in G-zone (2pm). I ordered the Kamonan Seiro Soba served cold on a zaru (bamboo tray) with a bowl of hot dipping duck soup („1000), and my wife got the grilled fish plate (saba that day, „950).
From 3pm, we just walked south west along Ginza avenue (Chuo dori) enjoying some leisure shopping, or more like my wife leisurely checked out store after store while I stood around watching people streaming up and down the stretch. The day was quite sunny. We stopped by a handbag store next to Ginza Dai Matsu restaurant, then back to the intersection with Harumi dori with the Wako department store. We then checked out the smaller street before looping back through Printemps department store to the Sukiyabashi street crossing in front of Sony building. Here I spent some time checking out the new products and their theater room while my wife shopped at the Nishi Ginza Department Store and bought a cute hat from Sanrein.
Around 5pm we headed back to Yurakucho train station and stopped for coffee for an hour.
Back to Shinjuku around 6pm, my wife went up to the room while I walked to the station for a „240 baguette at Hokuo bakery to eat with the fish cake we bought earlier in Tsukiji. Yummy, especially since I found out that we did packed some spicy red pepper picked fresh from our friend's garden last Monday. Because we checked out of here the next day, we had to finish all the food, fruits and cakes that we bought during the week or brought from Chiba. I tried the slices of chocolate cake and pistachio cake bought at Sadaharu Aoki, they were so moist and rich and just the right level of sweetness. I didn't try the chocolate-dipped orange slices but my wife liked it.
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