Something Fishy
by Rob Cummins
Had an interesting
day today. I had heard of the Tokyo fishmarket before, and was interested
to see it. However, it all gets rolling quite early in the morning,
as is normal for most markets I guess. Now on my days off I usually
rouse myself from my gentle slumber at the crack of noon, making
such a thing usually out of my time range. However, I don`t mind
seeing such wee hours from the other side, so made a plan last night
to venture out with a Japanese friend in Ginza. We amused ourselves
until 5a.m. when the trains start again, then head out to the market.
The subway that feeds the market is four floors below ground. When the train doors opened, we could smell fish.
We walked through rows and rows of market stalls, but I was surprised to see that only about half of them sold fish, the rest selling vegetables, or cooking equipment or whatever. We walked and we walked and we looked and we looked and it was interesting. After about half an hour of this we reached the fish market. What we had thought was the market was in fact a mere blip on the radar. A freckle on the face of the market proper just to stop you getting bored on the walk from the station to the actual market.
The market is amazing. Huge and amazing.
I would say that it was organised chaos, but to tell you the truth, it wasn`t really that organised. It was like a Bosch painting of Hell, but fish related. Shouting, carts, motorised vehicles, people, water, ice, knives, hooks, boxes, crates and fish fish fish fish fish.
I don't really have the words to describe it. It is a covered building. It curves to one side, turning through about 90 degrees, but so long that when you are inside you don`t really notice that you are turning. It is about as wide a city block, with paths running across like the spokes of a wheel. And it is full, absolutely full of people selling stuff that just came out of the sea.
Now of course it is mainly fish, but this being Japan, there was a lot of other stuff as well. I saw many, many different types of fish, from tiny little whitebait to massive whole tuna being filleted by knives twice the length of my arm. I saw whale and sea urchin, crabs and oyseters, sea cucumber and prawns, squid and octopi. I saw live fish, dead fish and live fish being turned into dead fish. I saw a fish head twice the size of my own. I saw things I couldn`t even come close to identifying.
I saw old-style fishmongers. With headbands and wooden sandals. Using old, thin, wicked looking knives. Carrying around their fish on old wooden carts and stacking them in wooden crates. I saw state of the art fishmongers. Wearing rubber gumboots and wetsuits. Using stainless steel blades and motorised trolleys, packing their wares in styrofoam. I saw people yelling and selling, buying, cutting, gutting, preparing, filleting, eating, smoking, spitting and yelling some more. All the while bulldozers are pushing around the used styrofoam and broken wood.
Two things amazed me the most. One, that right in the middle of this vast noisy complex, there were people with the same kind of stall, selling the same kind of fish as everywhere else in the hubbub. How did all of these hundreds and hundreds of vendors manage to turn a profit ? Also, the sheer weight of sea life on display was just mind boggling. And this is being taken from the sea every single day ! I`m not getting ecological here, I believe that it is sustainable, but it makes you realise just how much stuff must be being born in the sea every day, if one city in one country alone can draw out so much of it. Unbeleivable.
I came close to death many times on this day my friends. Motorised carts and much larger vehicles whizzed around left and right. It was hard to heard them in the din, and hard to see through the crowds. And on the greasy, slippery floor I wasn`t exactly the most fleet of foot representative of mankind. Then there was the knives. I have never seen such blades in my life. Long, thin and wickedly sharp, they were in constant whizzing motion all around, sometimes mere inches away.
We eventually retired, exhausted, to one of the many on-site sushi shops, and ate some of the freshed raw fish you can have without catching and preparing it yourself. Breakfast of fish that had probably mere hours earlier been swimming around, thinking fishy thoughts.
Anyway, it was great. If you`re even in Tokyo I heartily recommend it. But don`t wear your best shoes.
Rob "That One Looks Like Me" Cummins aka
John "Uhhh, No Thanks, I Had Manta Ray Intestines For Lunch" Boy