Miso Soup

Japan is fully surrounded by sea, so it’s no real surprise that a lot of Japanese meals have something to do with fish and other sea critters. In Tokyo fresh fish will usually be brought to shore early in the morning (4.30h), where it will be traded on the Tsukiji Fish market. According to our Lonely Planet guidebook, the look and feel of the Tsukiji Fish market between 5.00 and 8.00 is unique and should not be missed when visiting Tokyo. We left the hotel at 6.30 and arrived at the market at 7.00, that is, we arrived at the subway station at the entrance of the market. We walked around for a bit, until we found a leaflet with tourist information that showed us exactly where we needed to go.

This specific fish market is supposed to be one of the biggest in the world, which, given the shear size of the complex and the absurd amount of people, is probably right. Walking around the market is really interesting, there are hundreds of cars, hand carts and mechanized trolleys all moving in different directions at any time who are apparently all out to run you over. Inside the market (which is really also outdoors, but has a roof and two walls, so I’ll call it inside) you find the actual trading part of the market. Here fish is delivered, chopped into smaller pieces and then sold. Walking through the narrow lanes between suppliers was a challenge, as containers of fish blood and guts are dumped on the spot and we didn’t feel like we needed that kind of thing on our shoes. Although the blood was not an excellent sight, the whole experience was pretty fun.

You might expect the smell of this place to resemble the smell found in the deeper layers of hell, but that is totally not the case. Fresh fish doesn’t smell bad, which was good as we hadn’t had breakfast yet that morning. On the subject of breakfast, Lonely Planet says: When you visit the Tsukiji fish market, you cannot afford to miss a local sushi breakfast. The fish in the sushi comes directly from the market and is de freshest you will ever eat. So as we walked away from the fish market, we looked for a breakfast spot and sure enough, after a couple of minutes, we saw a little restaurant where some other tourists were eating. When you’re about to enter a sushi restaurant at the Tsukiji Fish market with this thought on your mind: “Aaah, what could go wrong?”, you might be better off to just walk away. McDonalds sells a great breakfast, that will set you back only a few dollars. But hey, what could go wrong? So we entered the restaurant.

The restaurant offered a breakfast deal that included 8 different sushi in combination with soup and tea. Hot, green and different are the only words I can use to describe the tea to you, as I still don’t know what the taste reminded me of. Our 8 pieces of sushi looked okay, but the rice used to create the sushi turned out to be a mix of 70 percent rice and 30 percent wasabi. Seven sushi where made out of a little brick of rice mix, with a small piece of fish on top of it. The last sushi was fish with rice mix rolled in a dark green leaf or something. Everyone had a table, but we of course had the great honor to eat at the bar, so the sushi chef was in front of us the whole time. As Yvo attempted to dip his first sushi in some kikoman (the black salty soy sauce), the chef started pointing at and talking about the sushi. Both of use are absolutely fluent in virtually every language spoken by man, but for some reason we didn’t quite understand what the chef was trying to say. Yvo tried his: “What is it boy, did Timmy fell down the well?”, but it didn’t help. Finally the chef made some gestures, indicating that the rice should not come into contact with kikoman, but that we should turn over our sushi and only dip the fish part in it. As if eating with chopsticks wasn’t difficult enough.

While Bernd was trying to extinguish some wasabi with green tea, Yvo tried the soup. The Miso soup had a lot of fish parts in it and tasted, well, fishy. Yvo was about halfway done, when he spew something back in his bowl and declared that whatever he just had in his mouth, was impossible to chew. He’d only managed to bite a small bit off, but that was the best he could do. At first the little black chunk looked like some sort of shiny mussel, but as Yvo turned it over with his chopsticks, it became clear that it was something else. Some people would feel nauseated by the sight of a fisheye in their soup, but Yvo took it like a champ. He managed to finish the bouillon part of the soup and noted that ‘Miso soup’ probably is short for ‘mi so sorry I ordered it soup’.

A short subway ride from the Tsukiji fish market took us to one side of Tokyo’s most famous bridge: The Rainbow Bridge. It took us about 45 minutes to cross the bridge on foot, a rewarding walk as it provided us with brilliant photo opportunities. The bridge ends in the district of Odaiba, home of Tokyo’s copy of the Statue of Liberty (what is it with Japan copying French structures?) and the Fuji TV Headquarters. The tiny statue wasn’t really impressive, but combined with the Rainbow bridge in the background, it was worth the picture :). To visit to the Fuji TV Headquarters was nice and the observation deck in the sphere gave us a nice view over that part of the city. In the evening we visited Shibuya and took some photos of the Shibuya 109 building. It was cool to visit Tokyo, but we were both happy to leave for Hong Kong the next morning.