Tokyo: Tsukiji & Toyosu Market Food Tour with Licensed Guide

4.77

(157 reviews)

What’s the experience like?

We were already weaving through Toyosu’s wide walkways before I’d finished my first coffee — the place hums even when you think it shouldn’t. Our guide, Yuki, waved us over to the glass wall where you can watch the fish sellers below. It’s oddly quiet up there, but you can almost feel the cold air and hear knives clinking on tuna somewhere down on the floor. I didn’t expect to get hungry so fast just watching people work.

After that, we hopped the train to Tsukiji Market — it’s only a few stops but feels like a different world. The air changed; suddenly it smelled like grilled eel and soy sauce, mixed with something briny. Yuki pointed out a stall selling uni (sea urchin) stacked in neat wooden boxes. I tried to say “uni” in Japanese and probably butchered it because one of the vendors laughed and handed me a piece anyway. It was creamy and salty, almost too much at 10am but somehow perfect. There’s this rhythm to Tsukiji — people darting between stalls, old men calling out prices, little kids tugging at their parents’ sleeves for snacks.

We ducked into Namiyoke Shrine for a moment (Yuki said it protects the market from waves — which made sense when you remember all this used to be sea). The stone lions looked worn down by time or maybe just by all the hands that touch them every day. I liked that pause; it felt like everyone around us was moving fast except inside those gates.

I still think about how easy it was to just keep wandering after our tour ended — Yuki left us at the edge of Tsukiji with suggestions for breakfast sushi or sweet omelets if we wanted more. We didn’t rush off right away. Sometimes you want to hold onto that feeling of being in someone else’s city, even just for another hour or two.