The History of Toyosu Fish Market
The market you walk into at five in the morning is seven years old. The trade inside it is four hundred. It has moved twice: from the foot of Nihonbashi bridge to Tsukiji after an earthquake, and from Tsukiji to Toyosu in 2018. Every date below comes from the Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market's own record. Toyosu Fish Market tuna auction tours take you into the third of those three markets.
Nihonbashi, and thirty fishermen from Osaka
Tokyo's food markets are dated by the city's own market department to around 1603, when Tokugawa Ieyasu established his government at Edo. By one account recorded in that history, Mori Magoemon came to Edo in 1590 with nine of his family and more than thirty fishermen. He was headman of Tsukuda village in Settsu province, now part of Osaka. His men supplied the Tokugawa household, and were given permission to sell what was left over to everybody else.
Those leftovers were sold at the foot of Nihonbashi bridge, and that is the beginning of the Uogashi, the fish quay. Produce markets grew up at about the same time without any licence at all, from a vegetable market at Yatsugahara near what is now Kanda Sudacho.
1877 — four licensed fish markets and sixteen for produce
After the Meiji Restoration the markets went through a bad decade, and in 1877 Tokyo Prefecture published regulations that limited how many there could be and where. Four seafood markets were licensed: Nihonbashi, Shinba, Shiba Kanasugi and Senju. Sixteen produce markets were licensed alongside them, at Kanda Tamachi, Kyobashi and a dozen other places across the city.
The regulations also capped the number of wholesalers and brokers, required them to form associations, and charged licence fees. They lasted until 1896, when supervision passed from the prefecture to the Metropolitan Police.
1923 — the law, and then the earthquake
The Central Wholesale Market Law was enacted in March 1923. It had been pushed hardest by the Nihonbashi fish market association itself, which petitioned the city for a municipal market in 1911. Their own site was cramped, the trading was disorderly and the competition between wholesalers had become extreme.
Six months after the law passed, the Great Kanto Earthquake destroyed most of the markets in the city, the Nihonbashi fish market among them. The plan stopped being a proposal. Tokyo banned the old markets from reopening where they had stood. Temporary municipal markets went up at Tsukiji for fish and Honjo Yokoami for produce, and in 1924 the city council resolved on a permanent central market at Tsukiji with branches at Kanda and Koto.
1935 — Tsukiji opens, and the auction arrives
The main building at Tsukiji was finished in 1933. Trading then began in stages, as each dispute over who could operate there was settled: produce, poultry and eggs and freshwater fish in February 1935, salted and dried fish in June, fresh fish in November.
The change that came with it was open auction. Produce markets had always sold that way; fish markets never had. Trading at the Uogashi had been done in secret, with fingers worked inside a sleeve or a price whispered into an ear. The market department's own history records real confusion in the first months. Within a year the bidding was orderly enough that other cities copied it.
Eighty-three years at Tsukiji
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1590 | Fishermen from Tsukuda village arrive in Edo to supply the Tokugawa household |
| 1877 | Tokyo licenses four seafood markets, Nihonbashi among them |
| March 1923 | The Central Wholesale Market Law is enacted |
| September 1923 | The Great Kanto Earthquake destroys most of Tokyo's markets |
| 1924 | The city resolves on a central market at Tsukiji |
| 1933 | The main Tsukiji building is completed |
| 1935 | Tsukiji begins trading as Tokyo City Central Wholesale Market |
| 1971 | The Wholesale Market Law replaces the 1923 statute |
| 2018 | Tsukiji Market relocates and Toyosu Market opens, on 11 October 2018 |
2018 — the market moves to Toyosu
Toyosu Market opened on 11 October 2018. The Tokyo Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market's own timeline records the year in a single line: Tsukiji Market relocated, Toyosu Market began operating. Eighty-three years of trade crossed the bay in a few days.
What changed physically is enormous. Tsukiji was one vast shed, open at the sides, with visitors and turret trucks sharing the same concrete. Toyosu is three sealed, temperature-controlled buildings on three numbered blocks, with the visitors on walkways above the work rather than in it. That is why you watch the bidding through glass now, and why the market can let anybody in at five in the morning without stopping.
What stayed behind
Only the wholesale trade moved. The retail street outside the old market stayed exactly where it was: the knife shops, the tamagoyaki stands, the dried-fish counters and the small restaurants all still trade as the Tsukiji Outer Market. That is the source of the most persistent confusion here. There is no longer a fish market at Tsukiji, and there is still a great deal of fish being sold there.
Nearly every guided morning listed here visits both, which is the honest answer to the question of which one to choose. The Tsukiji Outer Market page covers what is still there and how to behave in it. What happens here puts a clock on a modern morning, and Toyosu Fish Market Tours lists the departures that cover both.