Tsukiji Fish Market: What to See, Eat and Know Before You Go

For more than eighty years, Tsukiji Fish Market was where Tokyo’s seafood changed hands, and for many travellers its pre-dawn tuna auction was the city’s great early-morning spectacle. That market has moved. In October 2018 the wholesale trade and the auctions left for a new site at Toyosu, across the water in Tokyo Bay, and what remains at Tsukiji is the Outer Market: a few blocks of narrow lanes packed with fishmongers, knife shops, dried-food merchants and small counters serving sushi and rolled omelette from early morning. This guide explains what Tsukiji is today, what to eat and see there, where the tuna auction can now be watched, and how to time a visit. On Day 2 of our Walking Japan small group tour, the morning begins at Tsukiji before the group sets off on foot through old Edo.

What is Tsukiji Fish Market today?

Today, Tsukiji Fish Market means the Tsukiji Outer Market, a retail and restaurant district of around 460 shops in Chuo City, close to Ginza. The inner, wholesale market, with its auction floors and licensed middlemen, closed in October 2018 and reopened on 11 October 2018 as Toyosu Market in Koto City, a short distance to the south-east on reclaimed land in the bay. The shops that had grown up around the old market’s walls chose to stay, and the Outer Market is now the Tsukiji most visitors mean when they talk about it.

The distinction matters when you plan. At Tsukiji you can wander, shop and eat breakfast, but there are no auctions and no wholesale floors to see. At Toyosu you can watch the auctions from viewing windows, but the experience is closer to touring a modern food-distribution centre. Many travellers do both; if you have only one morning, Tsukiji is the livelier and more atmospheric of the two.

From reclaimed land to Tokyo’s kitchen

The name tells the story. Tsukiji means “constructed land”. After the Great Fire of Meireki in 1657 destroyed much of Edo, as Tokyo was then called, the Tokugawa shogunate had this stretch of shallow coast filled in, and the new ground took its name from the work. For most of the Edo period, though, the city’s fish market stood elsewhere, at Nihonbashi, close to the bridge from which the shogunate measured its highways.

The Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 destroyed the Nihonbashi market, and the trade moved to Tsukiji, where the new Tokyo Central Wholesale Market began operating in 1935. Over the following decades it became one of the largest fish markets in the world, and from the 1980s, as Japanese food grew fashionable abroad, it drew a steady stream of overseas visitors. The move to Toyosu in 2018 ended 83 years of wholesale trading here. For the wider story of how a shogun’s castle town became a modern capital, our history of Tokyo from Edo to the present fills in the background.

Walking the Outer Market streets

The Outer Market is small enough to cover on foot in a morning, but dense enough to reward slow walking. The lanes are narrow, many of them roofed over with awnings, and the shopfronts are open to the street: trays of shellfish on crushed ice, bundles of dried kelp, boxes of pickles, sacks of tea, and racks of the hard, smoked fillets of bonito known as katsuobushi, which are shaved into the flakes that flavour Japanese stock. Some of these businesses supplied the old market’s restaurants and still sell mainly to chefs, so the mood in the early morning is working rather than touristic.

Look for the specialist shops as much as the food stalls. Tsukiji has long been a place where professional cooks buy their tools, and you will find shops selling Japanese kitchen knives, bamboo sushi mats, wooden rice tubs and tableware. On the edge of the district, Tsukiji Uogashi is a newer building developed by Chuo Ward to keep the market tradition alive after the move; according to Nippon.com, its roughly 60 shops are run by vendors who also trade at Toyosu, and its upper floor holds a food court, Uogashi Shokudo, which Go Tokyo lists as opening early in the morning.

What to eat at Tsukiji

Most people come to Tsukiji to eat, and the classic order is fish for breakfast. Small sushi counters and rice-bowl restaurants open early, serving kaisendon, a bowl of rice topped with raw seafood, and bowls of tuna in its different cuts, from the deep red lean meat to the pale, marbled fatty belly. Queues form at the best-known counters, so it pays to arrive early or to be flexible about where you sit down.

Tamagoyaki, the sweet rolled omelette built up from thin layers of egg in a square pan, is the other Tsukiji signature. Several shops cook it in front of you and sell slices on a stick; Go Tokyo singles out Tsukiji Yamachou, founded in 1949, as worth queuing for. Beyond those two, graze: grilled scallops and skewers, fish cakes, tuna-shaped pancakes and seasonal fruit. Portions are designed for tasting, which suits a slow circuit of the lanes.

If you want something to take home, dried goods travel best: packets of katsuobushi flakes, kombu, green tea, sesame and dried shiitake. Check your own country’s rules on bringing food products through customs before you buy.

Beyond the stalls: Tsukiji Hongwanji and Namiyoke Inari

Two religious sites frame the market and are worth a few minutes each. Tsukiji Hongwanji, a temple of the Jodo Shinshu school of Pure Land Buddhism, was first built near Asakusa and, after the 1657 fire, rebuilt here in 1679 on land its followers reclaimed from the sea. Destroyed again in the fires after the 1923 earthquake, it was rebuilt in 1934 to a design by the architect Ito Chuta, who drew on the ancient Buddhist architecture of India and other parts of Asia; the temple describes its rounded roof as modelled on the leaf of the bodhi tree. Inside are stained glass and a pipe organ, unusual in a Japanese temple. The main hall, its gate posts and stone walls were designated Important Cultural Properties in 2014. At the time of writing the grounds are free to enter and the main hall opens early in the morning, which makes it an easy addition to a market visit. It is an active place of worship, so keep your voice low inside.

On the other side of the market, the small Namiyoke Inari Shrine recalls the hard work of making Tsukiji. Its name means protection from the waves. According to Go Tokyo, the embankments built during the reclamation kept washing away until, in the shrine’s founding legend, a deity appeared from the sea on a stormy night; after the workers prayed, the wind and waves calmed and the work was completed in 1659. The shrine is known for its giant lion heads, which are carried through the streets in its festival in June, and people come here to pray for protection from disaster, safety at sea and prosperity in business.

Can you still see the tuna auction?

Yes, but not at Tsukiji: the tuna auction now takes place at Toyosu Market. At the time of writing, the official guidance is that the auction runs from around 5:30 to 6:30 in the morning, and that visitors can watch it without a reservation through observation windows on the second floor of the Fisheries Wholesale Market Building. A closer view from the lower observation deck, right above the auction floor, is limited to around 100 people a day and allocated by lottery, with applications made online in the month before your visit. Toyosu is reached on the Yurikamome line to Shijo-mae Station. Visitor hours, closing days and the application process change, so check the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market website before you go.

What is the best time to visit Tsukiji?

The best time to visit Tsukiji is mid-morning on a day the market is open. The Outer Market asks visitors to give professional buyers priority until 9 a.m., and Go Tokyo describes the lanes as liveliest between about 9 a.m. and 1 p.m.; by early afternoon many shops are closing. At the time of writing, much of the market closes on Sundays, national holidays and many Wednesdays, and each shop keeps its own hours, so check the calendar on the official Tsukiji Outer Market website before you go. For a quieter visit, arrive soon after nine on a weekday and eat breakfast or an early lunch before the late-morning crowds.

Market manners worth knowing

The Outer Market has its own house rules, and following them makes a visit more pleasant for everyone. Do not eat while walking: eat in the shop where you bought the food or in a designated area, and use the bins inside the stores. Do not touch the produce, particularly raw fish; ask the shopkeeper if you want to look more closely. Ask before photographing a shop, as some do not allow it, and do not expect to bargain. The lanes are narrow, so large bags are best left in a coin locker, and many smaller shops take cash only. An information centre, Plat Tsukiji, has maps and visitor information.

How much walking is involved at Tsukiji?

Tsukiji itself is not demanding: the Outer Market covers a few compact blocks on level ground, and a thorough visit involves perhaps an hour or two of slow walking and standing. The challenges are the crowds, wet concrete underfoot near the fish stalls, and few places to sit outside the restaurants. Tsukijishijo Station on the Toei Oedo line is about a minute’s walk away, and Tsukiji Station on the Hibiya line is only a minute or two away.

Tsukiji on Day 2 of Walking Japan

On our tour, Tsukiji is the starting point of a long day on foot. After breakfast the main baggage is sent ahead by courier to Sendai, so everyone carries what they need for the night in a daypack. The group visits Tsukiji in the morning, then walks through the streets of downtown old Tokyo to Fukagawa, where the poet Matsuo Basho kept his hut, visiting the Fukagawa Edo Shiryokan and the Basho Museum; our guide to Basho’s Fukagawa and the Edo he knew covers that walk in detail. The route continues through old Edo to Asakusa and Senso-ji, Tokyo’s oldest temple, before a mid-afternoon train from Asakusa to Nikko.

It is a fitting start, because the whole tour is built around walking: it follows long stretches of the route Basho took north, described in our introduction to walking Japan in the footsteps of The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The tour is rated Activity Level 3 – Moderate to Challenging, and participants typically walk for up to five hours a day. An Odyssey Program Leader travels with the group throughout.

Tsukiji no longer has its auctions, but it has kept what made it worth visiting in the first place: the cooks’ shops, the breakfast counters and the sense of a working Tokyo neighbourhood built on land taken from the sea. On the Walking Japan tour, a small group of up to 16 travellers begins there before walking into the Edo of Basho and on towards the north.