After our pilgrimage to the Great Buddha of Kamakura, we returned to downtown Tokyo to spend the night at a friend's apartment and get ready for an early morning trip to Tsukiji Market. We had heard that if you can bear to wake up before the crack of dawn and make your way unobtrusively through piles of fish slime and whizzing buzz saws waiting for freshly auctioned creatures of the deep, you can watch them auction off hundreds of thousands of dollars of premium grade tuna. Whether or not four white people, three of whom tower at 6+ feet, can be unobtrusive in Japan was beside the point. We were getting ready for an adventure.
Of course, Joe and I realized that waking up before 5:00 a.m. was not a sensible option, and that a much more reasonable choice would be to simply stay awake until 5:00 a.m. And what better place to stay awake in Tokyo than at ageHa, a massive club on the waterfront?
Our mother wholeheartedly concurred with the logic of this plan.
And so, our looks completed by a pair of fly kicks (Joe) and fake eyelashes (myself... perhaps not an experiment to be repeated) we set off. Though the DJs were only okay, the poolside dance floor proved to be the perfect setting for an impromptu dance-off with a couple of Japanese hipsters. Five years in Eastern Europe combined with countless off-the-chain-basement-raves (Joe) and more than a few kitchen-dance-parties-of-one (yours truly) to make us the clear winners. We politely bowed, clutched hands, and smiled our goodbyes to our new friends before we returned to the main floor where hundreds of Japanese people faced the DJ and bobbed ever so slightly side-to-side as the beat pounded from every direction.
You see, Japanese people don't dance. Well, perhaps that is too broad a statement... at all of the live performances that I have been to, the audience appeared to have all gotten together pre-show and decided that they would, under no circumstances, deviate from the side-to-side bob. As with many things in Japan, the gaijin did not get the memo and can be easily spotted as their fellow concert goers politely bob away leaving a "safe zone" around the dancing deviant.
We eventually tired of all this space-clearing and realized that 5:00 a.m. comes faster than one might expect. We returned home in the nick of time and promptly set off for Tsukiji Market where we encountered more styrofoam cartons of UFOs (Unidentifiable Fish Organs) that I could have ever imagined. We did manage to sneak (re: gaijin smash) our way to the super-secret backroom where, only 6 days later a tuna would be sold for $175,000.
Eventually, we were shooed back to the main area. Rumor has it that the bulk of the tuna auctions now happen completely behind closed doors.
Check out videos of the tuna auctions here. They're not mine, but we were in there dodging men with hooked poles and "turret trucks" (ターレットトラック) - which look more like pod-racers full of tuna - with the rest of them.
Some photos of the carnage...
inspecting the fish and havin' a cigarette... not an uncommon sight
back to the main market area, watch the fingers now...
He could fillet a fish in less time than it took me to write this sentence.
Any guesses? My money is on ovaries. Ramble: I have, in fact, eaten fish ovaries. Truth be told, they're not bad.
slabs of tuna, probably about a meter long
tea time
