Tskuiji Fish MKT.

TIME MACHINE...

At this point it is Friday, and I've been in Tokyo since Tuesday evening. I did my research and knew that I wanted to visit this infamous fish market, but there's a catch - the best time to visit is before 8am, in fact, the best time to see the real action is around 5am, but that's not gonna happen.

I meet up with some friends and have dinner. A bottle of wine, some beers, and of course sake later and I switch gears and go dancing. After leaving the first location the crew decides to keep it classy and go to the corner store instead of buying drinks at the next club. I look at my friend Sophia, and ask, "OK, so we're gonna brown-bag-it?" She chuckles and replies, "Ya, but its Tokyo, you can drink on the street." As I chug my Cola-Shock, we role through to our next destination. The dance floor flashed in shades of pink and blue, and I think Tokyo is amazing right about now.


Next thing I know, the crew and I are chillin in the alley outside with everyone else, the club being closed. The mood ring that is the Tokyo sky is now morphing from a midnight black, to a navy blue. I decide I need some food - typical. Sophia and I grab some grub.





Freeze.

I realize it's about 6am, and I that I'm with someone who is fluent in both English and Japanese, it's now or never. This is how I end up going to the Tskuiji Fish Market. The only other time that I was this delirious I ended up at a walnut factory, literally. This time, I'm in Tokyo and at one of the most famous fish markets in the world.







and then around the bend from the actual market place of fish, came this:

Japan is one of the cleanest places I have been to. At all hours of the day there is an orchestra, or army, of people dressed in their respectable uniform cleaning the streets with their wands. Wrappers, cans, gum, receipts, hair pieces, everything is picked up usually within minutes of hitting the ground. After seeing the pile of Styrofoam at the fish market, I realized, that although the garbage is not on the ground or visible first hand, it is there, but strategically hidden - not so much at the market. I found out that Japan restricted public trash cans due to fear of bombs, not to instill new lifestyle values - although, those have followed suit.

At home, our lifestyle and habits are the breeding grounds for garbage, which begs the question: could this country 86 trash cans, and thus, trash?