Day 2 (part I) - Tokyo

Day 2 (part I) - Tokyo

Tsukiji Fish Market

My first whole day in Tokyo got started incredibly early. We woke up at around 6:00 a.m. and headed over to the world famous Tsukiji (basically pronounced "skee-jee") Fish Market near Tokyo Bay.

For those who are unfamiliar, the Tsukiji Fish Market is the largest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world. The market consists of two areas, the outer market and the inner market.

The outer market has various seafood items for sale, in addition to some cooking supplies and other food related materials. It is a complete madhouse - I couldn't walk two feet without almost being run over by a forklift or stepping into a box full of live fish.

The inner market is where the more important items, including tuna, are bid on in a live auction. By the time we got there many of the fish had already been sold but we did get a chance to see a few sales. Here are a few videos of the madness:

From my understanding, bidders for the fish usually include agents for restaurants, large retailers, and food processing companies. Some single tuna sell for thousands of dollars, which is not all that surprising with the ever increasing popularity of sushi worldwide. The Tsukiji fish market sets tuna and other fish prices throughout the world. It is my understanding that they will be converting to a new type of market in the next few years so I feel very fortunate to have been able to see this market while it still is the center of the fishing/sushi industry.

After being purchased many of the Tuna, swordfish, and other fish are sliced up with table saws in the outer market and package them up for worldwide distribution.

After watching the auctions we headed over to a sushi restaurant across the street from the market for some breakfast sushi. Doesn't sound like a great idea but it was a really interesting experience. We sat at the bar area and had sushi chefs whip up various pieces of fresh fish and put them on our plate. I had probably the freshest sushi/sashimi possible and it wasn't a problem eating it so early. The only problem that I had was eating the sea urchin that was placed on my plate.

I suppose there are some twisted, masochistic individuals out there who actually enjoy eating this foul creature, but to me it was possibly the single worst thing I have ever tasted in my life. After having three or four pieces of the best sushi I have ever had I decided to get a little adventurous and go ahead and try out the yellow pasty piece of sushi sitting at the top of my plate.

How bad could it be? I thought.

It might even be good. After all, I just tried some eel (unagi) for the first time a few minutes ago and it was absolutely delicious.

The chef was kind enough to serve me a tennis ball sized piece of urchin, which for some God forsaken reason I decided to stick in my mouth all at once. In retrospect that had to be one of the five or ten worst decisions of my entire life. My initial urge to spit the urchin back out on the table, gargle the taste out of my mouth with some wasabi-filled soy sauce and curse out everyone in the entire restaurant was put aside, as I was sitting at the counter right in front of the chef who served it to me and I didn't want to be insulting. So, I started chewing as fast as I could, which, it turns out, was not very fast at all. Each partial bite that I swallowed I had to choke down, with all of it almost coming back up two or three times. At the end, I finally finished the urchin and feigned a smile. I think I may have even said "that wasn't so bad" or some other ridiculous lie, while I tried my best to ensure that the buckets of water that formed in my eyes didn't formulate into actual tears.

I tried to enjoy the rest of my sushi but the damage had already been done. As I handed my money over I thought about how funny it was to be paying someone to make me exercise my gag reflex. That is akin to giving someone $30 to give you a swift kick in the nuts. The next time I eat urchin, someone will be paying me to do it.

Cityview

After the fish market we took a quick nap and then headed out to Rappongi to check out the Tokyo cityview.

Rappongi is a neighborhood in Tokyo that is best known for its nightlife (we went there on weekend #2) but it also has a skyscraper located on high ground that provides an excellent view of the city.

As you can see, in my opinion Tokyo is not as highly condensed and vertical as some cities like New York, but it is very large in terms of geographical space and it also has many pockets of large skyscrapers. According to many sources, Tokyo is the largest city in the world.

The cityview building also is home to a modern art museum/showroom. The majority of the items on display that afternoon were pieces by Annette Messager, a French artist who is known for installation work which incorporates photography, physical objects, prints, and drawings. It reminded me of the sculpture art done by Catherine O'Hara's character in Beetlejuice (Delia Deets?)

especially this particular room (we were not allowed to take pictures or videos, so I shot this from my pocket - sorry if it's a little jumbled).

There were a lot of great exhibits, but we were not allowed to take pictures, so here is one I found on the internet that was on display.

The last one was particularly interesting - entitled "Casino". It was two adjacent rooms, with only a doorway visible into the back room, both covered with a continually flowing red cloth with various skulls hanging from the ceiling and different colored lights underneath the cloth.
The movement of the cloth and the sound of the blowing air was very hypnotic. It looked like a perpetually rocking sea of blood.

The entire exhibit was rather unusual, but overall it was very interesting, thought provoking, and extremely innovative.

Akihabara / Electrictown

After the cityview we decided to check out Akihabara, a neighborhood in Tokyo known as "Electrictown". It is a major shopping area for various electronics, anime & manga (Japanese animation), and computers.

As everyone knows Japan is a very technologically advanced society and Tokyo is the center of it all. Tokyo is a major test market for many new electronics, with many concept electronics being tested first on the Tokyo market before they are mass produced and sent to the US and other countries. Akihabara is supposedly a place where you can get a sneak peek at some electronics before they hit the main stream market. It is probably most well known for being the first place to offer personal robots and robotics. Below is a picture of Eli next to a rather strange robot.With respect to electronics, I did see some interesting phones and some extremely high storage memory cards, but overall I didn't see anything that was over the top.



Most of the fun came from seeing the Japanese animation signs and stores all over. It was like a giant video game arcade / comic book convention that encompassed three or four city blocks. Many Japanese people are completely obsessed with anime and manga, and Akihabara was a great place to get a little taste of that obsession. Each comic book store we went into was packed with people running around and grabbing everything on the shelf. There were also countless signs and billboards with giant cartoons.

In the spirit of the video game arcade feel we decided to head into an arcade to check out some weird stuff and we ended up playing a few games while we were there.

It was nowhere near as fun as SEGA World, which we went to in Nara and I will discuss later, but it was a pretty good time.

We also stopped in a Pachinko parlor to check out and possibly play some Pachinko. Pachinko is, from what I could gather, a game that is some sort of hybrid between pinball and slot machines. People carry around huge trays filled with little silver metallic pinballs and continually pour them into these pachinko machines.

There are flashing lights and loud noises, much like a casino slot machine area. Everyone in the entire place smokes and there is just a lot of weird stuff going on in these parlors. I took a video that I hope does it some justice.

I was also not allowed to take pictures in here so I was just able to get this one.

We didn't stick around to play as we were a little weirded out by the whole situation. I think Pachinko is a game that simply doesn't really translate well to our culture and I'd be perfectly happy if I never played that game in my life. But, it is a very popular and successful game so I'm sure it's a blast if you're into that kind of thing.


We did a lot on this day so I'm going to cut this short and pick up the evening activities in the next post.