Tokyo: 4am, Fish Intestines, and the Architecture of Consideration

Tokyo: 4am, Fish Intestines, and the Architecture of Consideration

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“Fish intestines have a texture somewhere between tofu and something you cannot quite name and a flavour that is oceanic and rich and very good.”

At half past five in the morning, the Tsukiji fish market smells of the sea and cold air and somewhere underneath both of those, of commerce conducted at a pace that makes spectating feel slightly inappropriate. The tuna on the slabs are the size of small cars. The men moving between the stalls have been there since two in the morning and regard the small number of tourists who have made it in time for the early trading with the patient indifference of professionals who have learned that certain categories of inconvenience are not worth the energy of resisting.

Tsukiji opened in 1935 following the destruction of its predecessor by the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, one of the deadliest natural disasters in Japanese history, which killed an estimated hundred and forty thousand people across the Tokyo and Yokohama region. The market that replaced it on the banks of the Sumida River became over the following decades the largest fish market in the world, processing in its peak years approximately two thousand tonnes of seafood per day and functioning as the distribution hub for fish consumed across Japan, a country that eats more seafood per head than almost any other nation and has done so for reasons that combine geography, Buddhist dietary tradition and the specific protein requirements of a population that was, for much of its history, unable to rely on livestock farming at scale. Japan consumes roughly eight percent of the world’s fish catch while representing less than two percent of the world’s population. Tsukiji was where much of that fish passed through.

I was there because three Germans from the hostel had invited me the previous evening. I had been awake for twenty-six hours on arrival and had declined the dinner invitation but said yes to the four o’clock wake-up with the clarity that extreme tiredness sometimes produces and that more ordinary tiredness never does. The market’s inner wholesale area, where the famous tuna auctions happen, was not open to visitors, but the outer market, the warren of small stalls and restaurants surrounding the main hall, was accessible from early morning and was where we ended up at a counter staffed by a man who communicated the menu primarily through the items themselves, which were arranged in front of him and which we selected largely by pointing.

1935

Tsukiji opened in 1935 following the destruction of its predecessor by the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, one of the deadliest natural disasters in Japanese history,...

Tokyo: 4am, Fish Intestines, and the Architecture of Consideration

A colleague at work called Jon had been telling me for several years that I would eventually like fish. I had been equally clear for several years that this would not happen. The menu in front of me at 6am in Tsukiji included shrimp soup, scallop, ark shell, squid, sea urchin, fish eggs, and something the label described as fish intestines, which is either the most honest or the least appealing food description I have encountered, depending on your relationship with accuracy. Jon was right. Fish intestines have a texture somewhere between tofu and something you cannot quite name and a flavour that is oceanic and rich and very good. On the Shinkansen south that afternoon I ate baby octopus tentacles as a snack, as though this were a normal thing that people from Barnsley do.

The rest of Tokyo was condensed into what remained of the day after a four o’clock start. The Imperial Palace gardens occupy the geographical centre of the city with the calm authority of somewhere that has been there longer than the city around it and expects this relationship to continue. The Shinjuku government building allowed me to take a lift to the forty-fifth floor and look at the city spreading in every direction to the visual horizon, which at Tokyo’s density is a long way. The building, opened in 1991 to designs by Kenzo Tange, connects to the station by an underground travellator running for roughly half a kilometre, an arrangement that speaks to the Japanese understanding that the difference between a good idea and a working idea is the infrastructure that makes it function.

This is what strikes you most persistently in Japan, more than the temples and the food and the technology: the quality of consideration embedded in the design of ordinary things. The tactile paving strips that guide visually impaired pedestrians through train stations, the audible signals at crossings that vary by location so that people who use them daily can orient by sound, the heated vending machines for hot drinks, the heated toilet seats, the baggage carousels at the airport where everyone stands behind the line without being asked. None of these things are accidental. They are the accumulated result of a society that has been asking, at scale, how things could work better, and then implementing the answers. Japan’s per capita GDP is not the reason its public spaces function the way they do. The reason is a set of social and civic values that were formed over centuries and that produce, as their practical expression, a country where the trains run on time because everyone involved has decided that they should.

The Shinjuku government building allowed me to take a lift to the forty-fifth floor and look at the
city spreading in every direction to the visual horizon, which at Tokyo's density is a long way.

At the NHK studios I was invited to read the news. There was an English version of the script. I delivered it in an accent borrowed from newsreaders of the 1970s and received, from an audience of Japanese schoolchildren, a response that could have been sincere appreciation or very politely ironic, and which I chose to interpret as the former.

By the time I got back to the hostel the four o’clock wake-up had arrived as a debt due. I slept at five in the afternoon and woke at six the following morning, which is either jet lag or evidence that the body has a more robust accounting system than the mind. The following morning I decided to go to Nagasaki three days early. The trip was already teaching me the difference between a city break, where efficiency is the measure of success, and whatever this was going to be, where the measure was something else and I had not yet decided what.

I booked first class on the Shinkansen. The bullet train runs at up to three hundred kilometres per hour on dedicated track, separated from the conventional rail network, using a signalling system that maintains precise spacing between trains while allowing frequencies that would be impossible on mixed infrastructure. It is also very quiet, and somewhere outside Shizuoka, Mount Fuji appeared in the window frame in exactly the orientation of the photograph you have seen since childhood, and I put down the octopus and looked at it for a while, and that felt like the correct thing to do.

This is what strikes you most persistently in Japan, more than the temples and the food and the technology: the quality of consideration embedded in the design of ordinary things.

Dave

Dave

A British ginger seeing the world one questionable decision at a time. Based wherever the wifi works.

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