Tsukiji Market

One of the famous tourist stops in Tokyo is Tsukiji fish market. It's the largest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world. It basically supplies the 30+ million people in the Tokyo metropolitan area with food. The main attractions for tourists are the tuna auction and sushi breakfast. The tuna auction got so popular that they actually had to set up areas for tourists to watch from because it was affecting business having tourists standing around everywhere.

The main problem with the market is getting there. Work begins at the market in the early hours of the morning, but the trains don't start running until much later. This poses the problem of how to get there early enough to see the real action. The tuna auction is open to tourists between 5 and 6:30 am. So you pretty much have to get there in that time frame. The subways to the Tsukiji stop only start running a bit after 5 am.

We met up at 5 am at Akihabara so we could take the Hibiya line down to Tsukiji. I got on the Yamanote line at 4:30 am. I actually got to the station just as it was opening. Not surprisingly, it was pretty empty. As it turned out, no matter what method of getting to Akihabara i thought of, they all involved me leaving my apartment at the same time. I thought of riding my bike to Akihabara, but that would take about an hour. I thought of walking to Tabata and getting a different train, but the added time walking just negated any other benefits.

By a stroke of luck, Steve and Matteo ended up getting on the train in the same car as me at Uguisudani. That might have saved a bit of trouble locating them at Akihabara, but it was completely empty at that time of day. We had planned on meeting at the Shouwa Dori exit, so when we got there we just waited around for Laura and Rob to show up. Once we all assembled and I introduced everyone to Rob, we headed to the subway and to Tsukiji.

In Tsukiji we had a mild idea of where the market was. Laura, Steve, Matteo and I had seen it from our cruise down the Sumida river. Other than that we weren't sure, but not too concerned. When we got there we actually just followed some signs. At one point, we decided to just turn down a side street and figured we were close enough that as long as we walked along the river we'd find the market.

We walked down the side street and soon realized that we had in fact found the market. We were dodging scores of motorized carts whose drivers were really skilled at maneuvering them, but were also not going to slow down for us. Rob pointed out that it felt a bit like Frogger. We kept walking around and saw some of the sushi restaurants that you can get breakfast at. We noted the location and kept going. We eventually found a couple other tourists who had a map of the market and got a bit better oriented. From their map we saw that we just needed to start walking down the rows and rows of stands, because the market isn't very orderly. You sort of just walk in and wander around. If it seems like you shouldn't go somewhere, that's actually where you should be walking. If you start going somewhere you shouldn't, someone will stop you.

So we had found the market and started actually seeing fish in various states of being alive. There were also tons of clams, mussels, conches, and abalone. They have band saws for cutting the fish down and some 5ft knives for it as well. Most of the fish comes in to the market frozen directly from ships.
We still hadn't found the tuna auction though. We went to where we thought it was, but only saw a door that said "Authorized Personnel Only." So we headed outside to get our bearing again. We found another guy with a map, but this time a guy who worked at the market came up and asked us where we wanted to go. He just took us there and pointed the way. Apparently, we were supposed to go through that door, because you ARE allowed in between 5 and 6:30 am.

The auction was almost over by the time we got there, but it was still interesting. I took a video of one of the auctioneers because he was so animated. Since the auction was winding down we decided to walk around the market some more and to get some breakfast. It probably took us another half hour to wind our way out of the market, all the while dodging the motorized carts.
We got back to where we had seen the restaurants and the one that had had a line outside when we walked by earlier, still had a line out front. We couldn't really tell why there was a line, since all the restaurants looked the same. I just looked on Wikitravel, which said that a few restaurants make it a point to only serve fish that has never been frozen. From what I could tell, the fish next door that had been frozen were still delicious. We ate and left and there was still a line at the place next door.

On my way back home, I passed through Akihabara station. I was pleased to see that the giant line of people waiting to get to the Yamanote line platform weren't heading my way. They were heading towards Tokyo and their 6 days-a-week, stressful day jobs.

Dinner last night

Towhata-sensei took us visitors out to dinner last night to a very small out-of-the way restaurant. I think he wanted to get us all together before we leave and while he was actually in Japan. He's probably one of the busiest people I've ever met, but also one of the nicest. He's one of the top earthquake engineers in Asia, if not the world, and he still manages to impress you with how down to earth he is. Topics at dinner last night ranged from the resignation of the Japanese prime minister to his favorite cartoons. He's apparently a big Flintstones and Looney Toons fan. Looney Toons was a good segue into classic music. He explained that he knew the entire William Tell overture by the age of five from watching Road Runner and Wylie Coyote. When I brought up Spike Jones, the composer, and began humming "The Merry Go Round Brokedown" he picked up humming right where I left off. Also interesting is that he teaches many classes in both Japanese and English, at the same time. He just translates everything as he goes.

Anyway, the point of this blog was to relate a story about his recent trip to Iran. Before going on this trip to Iran for a conference and for a bit of historic earthquake damage sight seeing, he convinced another professor (the one I met at Kyoto University) that he should grow a mustache, because in the Middle East men should have facial hair. This was actually a joke by Towhata-sensei, because these days in Iran there is not much difference if you have a mustache or not.

So on this trip to Iran, they visited Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran. They met with the civil engineering faculty and saw the faculty photos. Apparently Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has a doctorate in civil engineering and was a professor at the university. His picture is hanging up and beneath it it says "Assistant Professor." So Towhata-sensei asked the department head why they didn't promote Ahmadinejad. After all, he had accomplished so much, he was governor and is now president. The department head's response was that he did not have enough publications.

I found this story really funny and I'm hoping other people will see the same humor in it that I see. Towhata-sensei went further to explain that in Iran many of the well-respected international civil engineering journals are not considered as being rigorous enough in their reviews of papers. Some of these journals are reviewed by people not in the specific field of the paper. No, in Iran they believe that the journals of the American Society of Civil Engineers are the best place to get a paper published, since reviews are done by people in the field of the paper's topic.

Towhata-sensei joked further that maybe ASCE should reject some of Ahmadinejad's papers and send them back as "provisionally accepted" as long as he promises to terminate the nuclear research in Iran.