With 3 kids in tow, I may have tried to fit in more than I should have today, but we survived. It was however a massive, but very enjoyable day.

I've always wanted to visit Tsukiji fish market, but having young kids, getting them out of bed early enough, and across Tokyo early in the morning, it's never quite worked. Veronica knew I really wanted to go, and Charlotte was very curious to see what it was all about too, so she insisted we go.

I decided that I'd forgo the tuna action, which would mean attending before 5am to line up, just to watch a bunch of people shouting about fish in a language I don't understand. Instead the plan was to leave the hotel at 7:15am, get over to Tsukiji by around 8am, have a leisurely wander through the outer markets, before browsing through the inner markets after 9am, when they were opened to the public.

Most of my plans this morning didn't work out as expected for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, we found out that the courtesy bus we wanted to catch to Disneyland didn't start running until 7:30am. This wasn't a problem, and we got the 7:30 bus and were soon at Disney, at Maihama station. There we witnessed our first bout of peak hour train chaos.

Usually the Japanese are very courteous and organised on public transport. There are queues, and a logical order to the way people get on and off trains. On this occasion we were at the front of the queue, when the already full train pulled up, and 10 or so businessmen decided that they were more important than everyone else in the queue, and walked straight to the front of the line, and pushed their way onto the train, pushing Veronica and the girls out of the way in the process. This made me slightly disgruntled with one of the businessmen in particular, but I was told firmly by my wife that I was to immediately cease my current plan of extracting the man from the carriage and kindly asking him why he was so rude, so I begrudgingly let the doors shut and watch him speed away in our train carriage.

As we were stuffed onto the next train a few minutes later, no less crowded, we formed a cocoon around the girls, and Isabelle in particular, with my back to the door as more people attempted to force themselves into the carriage unsuccessfully. Around 30 minutes of hell, and 2 more train and subway changes later, we emerged at Tsukiji.

Tsukiji station is only a few blocks from the fish market, so we followed the crowds, and were soon wandering through the dirty, cluttered, crowded corridors of the outer market.
If you read any of the Tokyo guidebooks, or the majority of the Tsukiji market reviews floating around, they paint a picture of a vibrant, energetic and fascinating hive of activity, where all manner of delicious seafood is laid out to temp your tastebuds and stimulate your culinary urges.

If you're looking for that kind of review, I apologise. You might want to skip a couple of paragraphs.

To be honest, I hated it.

The outer markets, or what I saw of them, were good. Very narrow corridors, and all manner of food vendors, most (if not all) of them specialising in seafood as you'd expect, selling their freshly cooked, or in the case of sushi, freshly purchased and cut up, wares. Contentedly snapping away with the camera, I angered a little old lady stirring a large pot of something very strange. After I'd taken a photo she held up her hand in a "stop" sign, and after I'd put the camera down she started shaking her fist at me, and shouting in loud angry-old-lady style Japanese. I think I really upset her.

I just apologised in my best American accent, and continued on.

Further on were a variety of fruit, vegetable and handicraft sellers, and my personal favourite of the outer markets, the knife sellers.

By the time we'd made our way through the outer markets, Veronica was sick of it already, and having no interest in the fish market, we agreed to meet in 2 hours at a Starbucks we'd passed on the way out of the train station. I didn't realise it at that stage, but I'd need much less than 2 hours.


I can see why the fishmongers at Tsukiji despise the tourists. It really is a fast paced, and quite frankly damn dangerous place to wander around. Put a group of wide-eyed tourists in the mix, with their attention elsewhere and a camera held up in front of their face, and as I witnessed many times, there are many very close calls, and these wandering idiots could become downright dangerous. I did my best not to be one of these idiots, and I think I succeeded. I lost count of the number of times I was thanked for giving way to a cart or someone carrying boxes, so I must have been doing something right.

But as for the fish market, it was interesting initially, with all manner of seafood, both familiar and bizarre, both alive and very, very dead, laid out everywhere you looked.
After a while however, interest turned to amazement, which led to disgust. The sheer tonnage of fish, crabs, and other sea creatures which is hauled out of the ocean just to pass through this market every day is beyond belief. With no obvious bag or size limits in force, the massive amounts of seafood just sitting around, and what I expect is inevitable wastage at the end of each day, is just appalling. To think that this happens every day of the year makes you wonder just how long it can go on.


Perhaps I'm overreacting. I'm certainly not armed with the facts about the amount of wastage, or the sustainability of fishing practices on this scale, but if there aren't enough fish left for my grandchildren to have an ocean caught fish dinner, then I expect Tsukiji, and the other grand scale markets like it around the world, will be a large part of the reason why.

So all in all, 45 minutes was enough for me to see what I wanted to see from the wholesale fish market part of Tsukiji markets, so we fought our way through the carts, trucks and fishmongers, and exited the circus via the north gate.

Am I glad I visited Tsukiji? Yes, I think so.
Would I recommend it? As an eye opening experience, yes.
Would I go back? Never in a million years.

Veronica was surprised to see us back at Starbucks over an hour earlier than what we'd agreed on. After a coffee, and a hot chocolate for Charlotte, we decided to use the extra time to go for a wander through the Imperial Palace grounds, which were a few kilometers north of Tsukiji.

So we made the reasonably long walk through the crisp morning air, and then realised we were on the wrong side of the Palace grounds, and the entrance was still a long distance away. So we wandered through the park on the outskirts of the Palace, which has an interesting section designated for the homeless, or as the sign at the entrance to the park calls it: "Place for people who cannot go home". We only saw a few homeless as we walked through, which made me wonder whether they clear out the dead and frozen hobos each morning.

I'm not sure what I was expecting of the Imperial Palace grounds. Whatever I was expecting, I'm not quite sure it delivered. It certainly is picturesque, and the groundskeeping is done to OCD levels of perfection and magnificence, but all in all, it was just a pretty park. Nothing more, nothing less. In cherry blossom season however, the grounds would be utterly magnificent. Cherry blossom trees of all sizes were present everywhere you looked in the park. In winter, these trees are no more than just bare deadwood looking sticks, but in spring it would be spectacular.

On our way into the park, we were given 5 tokens, one for each person, which we had to carry with us, and hand in on the way out. I'm not entirely sure why. Entry was free, and you can only get in and out via the designated gates, since the whole place is surrounded by stone walls and a moat, so why the plastic tickets? When we left, they checked that the number of people matched the number of plastic tags we handed back. How could you possibly leave with more people than you came in with? And even if you tried, what would they do if 5 people tried to leave with only 4 little plastic tickets? Shoot the 5th? Detain the entire group? I just don't understand what purpose these little plastic tags served.

With the imperial palace done, we exited via the north gate, and as it was already lunchtime, and we hadn't even had breakfast, we looked for somewhere to eat. Very unsuccessfully. Around the palace grounds, we found nothing. After some searching (both on the internet, and in person) we gave up on trying to find sustenance, and began to head towards our 3rd, and thankfully last, item on the itinerary for the day. Skytree.


Back into the infernal Toyko subway for a couple of non-inexpensive journeys across several different rail lines (meaning a new fee for each line change) we arrived at Skytree city. This massive shopping arcade sits under Skytree, Tokyo's newest and grandest TV broadcasting tower. The shopping mall has floors and floors of all of the usual shops as you'd expect, as well as an aquarium, but it all leads up to the main even, which starts on the 4th floor, which is the ticket purchasing and boarding floor for Skytree.

Before going up, we tracked down the food court in Skytree city, and had some meals that were, frankly, underwhelming. Typical Japanese foodcourt fare of ramen, curry and japanese style hamburger, and we were on our way.


I've heard interesting stories where there was considerable wait times for going up Skytree, however it wasn't the case today. We bought the tickets at around 2pm, and were ushered in. For some reason there were some fairly stringent security protocols running, including a baggage inspection, which from my experience is very un-Japanese. I've never seen security measures like this when accessing any Japanese attractions in the past, and I'm not entirely sure what they were checking for. Weapons? Glass cutting tools? Contraband food and drink?

So we were stuffed onto the elevator for an uncomfortable, but thankfully brief 350m vertical ride to the viewing gallery, which rose so rapidly it felt like it left your stomach somewhere around the 200m mark.

The views, as you'd expect being 350m in the air, were pretty amazing. With a 360 degree viewing floor, and interactive displays dotted around the floors in every direction to tell you where you're looking and what you're looking at, there was never a shortage of things to look at. What there was a shortage of though, was space to be able to enjoy the view. It wasn't what I'd call "crowded", and I can certainly imagine it being a lot more busy that it was today, but there were still enough people to make it annoying.


Also disappointingly, the weather wasn't our friend today. While it was a fine day, there was a persistent fog, or snow, or mist, or something in the distance to the west which prevented a decent view of the mountains, most notably Fuji. Oh well. Can't win 'em all.

Skytree have a devious plot designed to extract money from suckers by offering them the opportunity to purchase a ticket to go up to a floor another 100m in the air, at a height of 450m, for a little bit extra. I am one of those suckers, since I'll only be here once, so Charlotte, Angela and I paid the extra and went up to the exclusive "Tembo Galleria".

To be honest the 450m deck was just a much less crowded, and much nicer carpeted viewing platform than the 350m deck, and the attendants were a little bit nicer to you when they greeted you as you walked out of the elevator. You couldn't see anything from 450m that you couldn't see from 350m, but nevertheless it was pretty cool.


The Tembo Galleria takes you in a pointless circular walk up an incline around the outside of the viewing deck, before you arrive at the 450m peak. At the peak there is a colourful, put completely pointless neon lightroom, containing a single "Skytree artwork" for some reason. Then, once you've danced as much as you like in the neon room, and have taken enough photos of the same view over and over again, you begin the unceremonious descent down another spiral ramp, before leaving the opulence of the 450m viewing floor and boarding an elevator which takes you back down to rejoin the scum on the 350m floor.

A short walk down some stairs to the 345m floor gives you the opportunity to "Skywalk". No lightsabres or anything interesting like that, but rather, just a perspex floor around 5m square, where you get the privilege of joining the other 100 people all trying to stand on this small space of see-through floor and treat themselves to their own personal dose of vertigo.

The problem with this, aside from the fact that to look down to the ground you had to look between the shoes of the people standing around you, was that there were actually 2 perspex floors. The one you were standing on, and another a few meters below it, which for me just made it look like I was looking down to the ground through a tunnel, rather than making it feel like I was in any kind of danger. To be honest, I got a greater sense of the height by simply leaning over the railing and looking down when I was up at the viewing platform.


With Skytree done, I filmed the descent, and we made the painful, but far less crowded backtrack through the metro subway and train stations, back to Maihama. Since it was around 5pm I was expecting the nightmare of peak hour traffic like we experienced this morning, but it just never happened. We were exhausted, but the public transport cooperated, and we were soon back on the courtesy bus, and back at the hotel.

The next 2 days are going to be no less busy. Tomorrow is Disneyland. Thursday is Disney Sea. Being a Disney partner hotel I was able to purchase the tickets at the front desk, which means we skip the lines and stroll right in tomorrow morning. 2 massive days ahead of us. I'd better get some sleep.