Day 4: Tuesday, November 25 (A Day of Difficult Eating)

Another day, another alarm set for 4:30am. This time, however, our trip to the Tsukiji fish market was a success. And what an experience it was. The Tsukiji fish market is the largest fish market in the world, and it's renowned especially for its tuna auction--some of the tuna can fetch as much as $10,000 each. The tuna are caught and frozen, then brought to the market, where they're auctioned off and then carted away.

Walking around the fish market is an exercise in chaos and treachery. Though tourists are tolerated, no concessions are made to them, and if I had to give a tourist just one piece of advice, it would be this: First, get out of the way--THEN worry about taking pictures. Besides people in rubber aprons rushing everywhere, there are many different types of vehicles--motorbikes, carts, one-person trucks--veering and speeding in every direction down the narrow aisles. They stop for no one. We managed to escape without injury, but I can't imagine this is the case for everyone.

The market is full of freshly caught fish both alive and dead. The dead are sometimes piled in buckets or pans of bloody water. The live ones are sometimes piled on tables, their mouths still gaping, or crowded into other buckets or pans. We saw one worker heave live fish onto a countertop--still flopping--and whack their tails with a huge knife. Watching this is not for the faint of heart, nor are the pans of what had to have been brains and hearts of some creature, who knows what.

After dodging and winding our way through the market, we did what everyone else was doing and chose a sushi restaurant for breakfast. There are restaurants throughout the "outer markets," where other food and cooking items are sold, and most had lines crowded around the door. We searched for and found one that had been recommended in an article we'd read, and fortunately had no wait. This breakfast proved to be our first Difficult Eating experience of the day. Though we both like sushi, we are not adventurous sushi eaters. And though we enjoyed most of the fish on our platter, we were ultimately left with three difficult items: salmon roe on rice wrapped in seaweed; sea urchin roe on rice wrapped in seaweed; and a slice of bright-yellow herring row with a strip of seaweed around its middle. All three gave us pause, but none more than the herring roe. It looked like a piece of wax textured with tiny pebbles--much like chicken flesh (and I use the comparison deliberately; keep reading). You'd think roe would be soft, as the salmon and sea urchin roe are; this was not. It was...crunchy. Alarmingly crunchy. Crunchy in a strange dried-mango-slice way, while being, quite clearly, not mango. We could not finish even our three-inch-long slice.

Next stop: Ginza, Tokyo's most upscale shopping district. This area felt very much like Fifth Avenue in NYC, but honestly it did Fifth Avenue to shame. There were just more stores, one after the other, in a neverending stream of luxury. Around us were men and women in suits, rushing to their jobs. It was a very pretty area, with tree-lined streets, and was a nice reprieve after the fish market. We ended up at the Imperial Palace, where Tokyo's imperial family resides. You can't get very close, but we squinted at it from afar. Closer to where we stood were gardens, which were, surprisingly, filled with sleeping homeless people. We'd seen a map earlier where an English translation had marked the spot as "Place for people who cannot go home," but whether being unable to go home seemed less likely than having no home to go to at all.

We finished off our time in Ginza by taking an extremely long walk in the wrong direction, then another extremely long walk in the right direction, to a Muji flagship store. We've been to Muji in NYC and Barcelona, but this Muji was totally different--several floors of food, furniture, clothing, and appliances, a Target of Tokyo versus the international stores' small collection of pleasingly designed office supplies, dishware, and travel accessories.

After a much-needed rest at the hotel, we had lunch at a tempura restaurant in Shinjuku then headed to Shibuya, one of the craziest and busiest areas of Tokyo. Shibuya can only be described as a Times Square gone wild--it has all the neon, all the traffic, and all the people, plus about a million more. What makes it crazier is that everything makes noise. Every neon display plays music; every building-size television screen plays a different advertisement at top volume; every store emits a dizzying cacophony of music or arcade sounds. Calling this sensory overload is a ridiculous understatement. Shibuya Crossing is the heart of it all, with thousands of people streaming in four directions at once. And looking calmly over the crossing from one side is a small bronze statue of a dog called Hachiko, who continued to wait at Shibuya Station for his master for ten years after the master died.

We walked around Shibuya, going into some sensory-overload shops, trying to win another adorable mole-creature (this one wearing a jaunty hat) in an arcade, trying to find Unazukin in a store called Tokyo Hands (unsuccessful), walking down a street lined with "love hotels" (hotels for brief trysts), finding two hotels near each other called "Hotel Will" and "Hotel If," and finally stopping for a rest in a cafe looking over the crossing.

Soon it was time to meet our friend Atsh for dinner. He'd offered to take us to a restaurant that would otherwise be pretty much off our radar as American tourists, someplace we'd never go on our own. So we met him in a neighborhood called Ebisu, and he led us to Ebisu Imaiya, which specializes in yakitori. (Yakitori is pieces of chicken put onto skewers and grilled. Kind of like shishkabobs, but at the same time not like shishkabobs at all.) A server led us up a narrow flight of stairs to a low-lit room with a narrow aisle down the center. The aisle was really a pebble-filled path with large stepping stones down the middle. On both sides of the aisle were small alcoves with low tables inside, with bench seats and a space under the table for sock-clad feet. Being clueless, I climbed into my seat without taking my shoes off, which then entailed an awkward moment of passing my boots under the table to Andrew. Sigh.

The restaurant had made a gesture towards an English menu, but it consisted of explanations like "Rever bucket" and was completely useless. Atsh suggested a multi-course menu, and of course we went with his suggestion. And so the meal began.

The meal, as I'm sure you can predict, was Tuesday's second incidence of Difficult Eating. It started off splendidly, with some nice Japanese beer and a skewer of grilled pieces of regular white-meat chicken. Next came a skewer of asparagus pieces. All good. But as the courses progressed--and there was a lot of progression, with around fifteen courses--things became more challenging. The first challenge was a skewer of chicken livers. I ate two of the three pieces and immediately regretted it. Andrew forced down one. The second main challenge was a skewer of grilled pieces of chicken skin. We managed to get this down because the skin was more or less disguised. Then came a small bowl filled with thin strips of chicken skin--perhaps raw, I don't know. Andrew managed this one; I could not. The next course: a skewer of pieces of something purply-black, which Atsh suggested we try before finding out what they were. They were...crunchy. They were not easy to chew into pieces easy to swallow. We never did find out what they were, only that they were yet another part of our exploration of the chicken. The course that finally did us in: a skewer of minced chicken grilled into a kind of meatball...served with a tiny bowl cradling one perfect raw egg yolk in which to dip it. I ate a few bites of the meat, but both Andrew and I bowed our heads and let the waiter take our yolks back to the kitchen untouched.

By the time we reached the end of the meal, I'd forgone my beer in favor of a soothing Perrier and had made a trip to the bathroom to run cold water over my wrists. Andrew had taken off his sweater; my sleeves were rolled up as far as they could go. It was such an amazing Japanese experience--and we were so lucky Atsh took us--but at the same time it was a meal I was happy to see the end of.

Experiences like this--when we're pushed aggressively past our comfort zone--are good for the soul in the long run, I think, even if in the short term they leave us feeling like the most unsophisticated, most unworldly people alive.

Some pictures from today:

They did Christmas, and they won

A sea of humanity at Shibuya Crossing

The fish market