Toyosu Market

The hall is vast, cool, and bright. Light comes down from high windows onto rows of stalls that seem to run on forever. The air carries the clean, cold smell of the sea. Somewhere below, before dawn, some of the most valuable fish in the world changed hands. This is Toyosu, the great market that feeds Tokyo.

To understand Toyosu, you have to know what came before it. For more than eighty years, the city's main fish market stood at Tsukiji, not far from here. Traders worked there in narrow lanes, among carts and ice and shouting. Tsukiji drew visitors from around the world, but it also grew old and crowded, and in time it could no longer keep up. Its narrow alleys had become part of the city's story.

So the wholesale market was moved. In October 2018, the inner market closed at Tsukiji, and the trading shifted here, to Toyosu, on the far side of the water. The new site is larger, fully enclosed, and kept cold throughout, so the fish never sits out in the open air. What you are walking through is the result: one of the largest markets for seafood anywhere on earth. The change was not welcomed by everyone, but it was done.

The ground itself has a story. Toyosu was built on reclaimed land that once held a gas works. Cleaning the soil took years and stirred up real argument about safety, which delayed the opening more than once. In the end the market was raised up on a structure above the ground, and the trading finally began.

Follow the marked visitor routes, because this is a working market, and most of it is for the trade, not the public. Along the way, large windows and upper galleries let you look down on the floor without getting in the way. From these you can watch the business of the market unfold below you. Signs in several languages point the way.

The part most people come for is the tuna auction. In the early morning, rows of huge frozen tuna lie on the floor, tagged and numbered, their tails cut open to show the quality of the meat. Buyers crouch to inspect them with flashlights and small hooks. Then a bell rings, and an auctioneer begins a fast, sing-song call that few outsiders can follow.

A single one of these fish can sell for an enormous sum. The finest tuna are prized above all others, and the bidding for them has reached famous heights. From the observation windows above, you can watch the hand signals and the quick nods that move fortunes in a matter of seconds. It is a quiet kind of drama, all eyes and small movements.

The auction happens very early. The floor comes alive well before most of the city is awake, around half past five in the morning. There are viewing areas where you can watch from above, and on some days a limited number of visitors can apply to stand closer, on a deck nearer the floor. Either way, you will want to arrive in the dark.

When the watching is done, follow your nose to the restaurants. Toyosu has rows of small eating places run within the market itself, and they serve what was traded that morning. This is where people come for a breakfast of raw fish over rice, as fresh as it is ever possible to find. Lines form early, so come hungry and patient.

Sit at a counter if you can. The chefs work fast and close. A bowl arrives: slices of tuna, sea urchin, salmon roe, glistening over warm rice. Eating it here, steps from where it was sold at dawn, is a different thing entirely from eating it anywhere else.

Up on the roof there is a green garden, open to the public, where you can stand in the daylight and look out over the bay and the channels of the harbor. After the cold halls below, the open air comes as a relief. Nearby, on the same reclaimed islands, sit newer attractions, including a museum of digital art that draws long lines of its own.

Before you leave, look back at the sheer scale of the place: the long halls, the ranks of stalls, the machinery of feeding a city of millions. Toyosu is young, opened only a few years ago, and yet it carries the trade that Tsukiji carried for generations. The setting is new and the old lanes are gone, but the fish, and the dawn, and the auctioneer's call go on. Step back out into the morning with that in mind.