On our first morning in Tokyo, we skipped the hotel breakfast to save room for a tour of the famous Tsukiji Outer Market. This was another one of the tours booked through the website where my daughter had the credit from a big sweepstakes prize so it cost us nothing out of pocket.
We met our guide at the Lawson store in the above picture. Even though we didn’t book a private tour, we again were the only ones booked that morning. Our guide was a Tokyo mom who had done a year abroad in Canada during university so she spoke great English. She ended up marrying a Canadian she met in Japan so kept up with her English skills.
The Tsukiji market used to be the main fish market in Tokyo, but about 15 years ago, the government built a new one on an artificial island in Tokyo Bay. The old market was knocked down, but the food stalls in the outer section remained and still are popular with both tourists and locals.
We stopped at several places around the market and tried lots of different food including tuna, Japanese omelet, oysters, savory frozen yogurt, and other great stuff.
Then we walked inside one of the nearby buildings which thankfully was air-conditioned. Inside, there were lots of fish and seafood vendors including one that sold blowfish. He had to be certified to remove the poison from the fish.
Our guide brought some of the blowfish, eel and other seafood to a seating area in the building where we all got to try everything. Here’s the saltwater eel.
At that point, we bid our tour guide goodbye and moved on with our day in Tokyo. We really enjoyed the tour and were glad to have someone take us to specific vendors rather than just blindly figuring it out.
Later in the week, my wife and I went back to the market for breakfast and found some of the same vendors from the tour. We enjoyed tuna, uni, blowfish (again) and eel.
If you’re going to visit the market, you could probably research which vendors to try and which to avoid, but the tour also provided some interesting background about the history of the market and probably allowed us to get more interesting food without a language barrier.
Up Next: Mount Fuji Full Day Tour from Tokyo
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