Yay! Im back in business and got the blog publishing again!
Last night was another wacky night where a whole bunch of the New Koyo folks hung out. The Singaporeans are an awful friendly bunch and were dishing out the free liquor like madmen. Oh, in fact i did verify, someone was killed right by the hotel. Apparently there was some sort of queue for something and an argument erupted over some line jumping. It was between 2 homeless guys and apparently one stabbed the other in the neck. Yes, must remember not to mess with the homeless guys (aside from being awful dirty, and drunk theyre actually pretty harmless and even friendly at times).
Singaporean brought up a story of how he was once in South Africa (i guess his family moved around a lot) and got mugged twice in one night...the second was more of a nuissance than anything because he had no money to steal, but the 3 black guys had pulled him into a car and when they dropped him off (laughing as they did so at his already being mugged), he had no idea where he was and was in a completely drunken stupor to boot.
Ok, back to Tokyo. Umm...woke up at 4:30 this morning to attempt the fish market AGAIN. Timed it pretty well this time and managed to get on the very first subway train out. Arrived in time to see the rows upon rows of flash frozen tuna. Its almost unfathomable that they bring this much tuna into Japan every day! Its sort of interesting that as far as the large fish go, i couldnt find anything else other than tuna! Just warehouse after warehouse of tuna.
Things are organized into processing sorts of rows where ya got the dock, Tuna warehouses where they hold the wholesale auctions, and then the retail markets with some pre-processing facilities (band saws) in between.
Its pretty interesting to observe the wholesale guys inspect the tuna; they look at the flesh at the tail which has been cut off. Within the retail space is a frenzy of hand cart pullers, motorized pullers, shoppers, and workmen. Its amazing to see them filet a giant tuna. Other than tuna, theres also the whole slew of assorted fish ranging from halibut to lobsters to blowfish and prawns. Most of it was already dead, with some freshly so...others were perhaps packaged already. The heaps of styrofoam standing at the side of the market were also quite impressive.
So i followed an article written in the tourist paper about a place called Sushibun located just next to the market. There were fewer sushi places than i had expected..i suspect they cater to the market workers more so than to tourists. The places hours are 5:30AM to 2:30PM but when i walked in at 6:30 it looked like i was the first customer of the day as they were still setting up (a couple other guys trickled in after me).
The article said htis place had "the best sushi, at the price, or even any price" so i picked this as my opportunity to sample Japans best sushi. It cost 3675 yen for an omakase, top of the line tasting platter. It came with mostly tuna, maguro and a and a couple different types of toro. There was also uni, ika, tamago, what i think was hamachi, ebi, and mackerel. There was also maguro maki and some miso soup. Overall pretty damn good, except that i still cant stomach raw squid.
Afterwares, i returned to the market where the retail section had picked up a bit as many shoppers (from restuarants perhaps) where rushing through the aisles with their giant baskets doing their daily seafood shopping. Lots of the tuna had also been processed and there were now huge slabs of tuna for sale. There were even some unattended tuna (frozen and thawed) lying around. Hard to imagine these things going, at times, for over a million bucks. Back at the wholesale area, most of the tuna not destined for the retail area was being boxed up for shipment to other parts of japan.
Just next to the fish market is the wholesale produce market which is relatively dull.
Im now at yet another internet cafe in central tokyo waiting for things to open up.
The local tourist mag has a listing for the "Ninja cafe" where waiters dressed in Ninja costumes serve you coffee.....
Oh yeah, and i met my first Aussie-Taiwanese guy last night. From Melbourne. Actually, there were lots of Aussies last night.
Posted by eric at October 22, 2003 06:41 PM