How to tour the Market on your own...

It's easy--The general idea is to WALK STRAIGHT, no matter what!

1) Get to the main entrance (seimon) of the Market before 5am. Maybe, identifying the main entrance is the largest problem. The good landmark to get to the seimon is a large building of the main office of Asahi Shinbun. Asahi Shinbun is one of the major newspapers in Japan. Asahi Shinbun is across the street at the same traffic signal in front of the Tsukiji Market seimon.
Suppose your taxi drops you off at an entrance besides the main one, you should find the main one by walking around (not inside) the Market.
The main entrance is the one you could find a good English map there.

2) Walk inside from the main entrance and walk straight along with the traffic.

3) Walk about 150-feet and you get to an intersection.

4) It looks like a dead end but it's not. You will see a lot of trucks parked ahead and EXTEND THE PATH you had been walking, squeeze your way between the trucks and keep walking in the straight direction.

5) Walk straight through a truck-loading area (the workers won't care about you unless you stand in their ways) and you will reach the middlemen store area.

6) The middleman store area is shaped like a Spanish fan from a bird's-eye view. The passages there are like the framework of a fan. Enter the middleman store area at any passage that just appeared in front of you and keep walking straight again.

7) When the middleman store area ends, you will find a building with 5 orange shutters closed. That is the fresh tuna auction site. If you don't find the orange shutters, it means that you didn't walk straight. You probably came out from the middleman store area too right, so turn to the left and you'll find the orange shutter building.

Most of the Tsukiji workers love foreign tourists that are adventuring their way through the Market, so relax and concentrate on not losing your direction to WALK STRAIGHT.

8) I suggest you to come to the main entrance at about 4:45am.
Walking in a regular pace, you could get to the tuna area not later than 5:05am.
The orange shutters don't open until about 5:35 because the fresh tuna auction starts at 5:30 and they only open when they ship the sold tuna out.

9) So, before that main attraction--and they also have patrolmen getting rid of tourists--, you could take a look at the froze bluefin tuna site. They have an area for tourists and a sign called the 'Visitor Entrance' so take a look there. At the back of that building, they have another site that is for the froze tuna besides the bluefin, which are yellow fin, big-eye and albacore tuna. That auction starts from 5:40. They have a lot of signs saying that the place is off-limits and also announcing once in a while not to be there, but there is a small path between the froze bluefin tuna site and the fresh tuna site and if you could go through the path, turn left and you could watch that auction, too.

10) There is also a shrimp site next door with a shrimp auction taking place from about 5:20 and you could watch it, too. Nobody will care about you.

Now, it's not too complicated, is it? If you cleared everything so far, you could take a look at the next stage of the tuna distribution.

11) Cut short the tuna auction and go back to the middlemen store area at about 5:40 or 5:50.
Go straight back again the framework of the fan. At the 4th 'avenue,' turn left. Look above your head and you might be able to find the signs indicating that you are walking the avenue of the 7000s and 8000s stalls. Stroll along this avenue slowly because this is an avenue called the TUNA BROADWAY. If you are lucky, you will be able to watch a middleman butcher the tuna he just bought and brought back to his stall from the fresh tuna auction site.

12) You could eat sushi at Sushi-dai or Daiwa-zushi, the best sushi restaurants inside the Market. You should go back to the intersection you were at 3) and turn right there.
You will find buildings with red numbers painted on the walls. Those are the annexed merchants' buildings. At the building number 6, you have the sushi restaurants.
Sushi-dai is the third stall from the end, next to a coffee shop and has a GREEN nolen hanging down (Nolen is a very short-sized curtain that is hanging at the entrances). It has only 1 stall and they would already have a long line already at 6:10 that you have to wait more than 30-minutes to eat.
I recommend you to eat at Daiwa-zushi. It is 4-stalls ahead from Sushi-dai, they have 2 stalls with brown nolens hanging down and you could eat immediately at around 6:10 on a weekday.

So, if you can follow these instructions--I hope that you could--you can get a good summary of what's happening at the Tsukiji Market for free!

Good luck!

* Things that you shouldn't do at the Tsukiji Market, but a lot of tourists do:

A) Using flashes at 9) the froze blue fin tuna site--There is one romuin-san (a labor man), using an axe to cut the tails of the froze tuna and he doesn't like flashes.

B) You also shouldn't use flashes when the auctions are taking place and when the Tokyo Metropolitan Government patrolmen are there. You probably won't know which ones are the TMG patrolmen, so you better not use flashes at any auction.

C) But most of all, the worst thing that tourists do is TO COME TO THE MARKET IN LARGE GROUPS.
At Tsukiji, 'Large groups' mean the same as 'Trouble' or 'Bad news.'
If you are a large group, I suggest you to divide it to small groups of 6 people at the most.
Even if you are a 5 or 6 people group, I suggest you not to be at the fresh tuna site around 5:35 like in 8), when they ship the auctioned tuna out.
You also should not go to the froze yellow fin, big-eye and albacore tuna site like in 9).

The TMG has a rule not to give permission to 'large groups' but they seem not to be sticking to this rule these days, and I see groups with about 20 people hanging TMG permissions in front of them touring the Market once in a while.
But the Market is a place where the workers have their own rules above the government rules.
Coming to the Market in large groups are practically annoying. The Japanese workers would curse at you a lot even though you might not understand.
I recommend to you strongly not to come to the Tsukiji Market in large groups if you can't divide the group to smaller groups.

Thank you!

[Acknowledgment]
Barbara Stickler-san played a big role to let us create this page.
We provided her a draft of this 'How to tour the Market on your own,' she tried it and gave us a lot of useful suggestions to improve it.
If it wasn't for her, this wouldn't have come out.

[Additional info from Barbara-san]
She told us, "Regarding the timing, I was at the market at 4:00 already and was not bored at all with so many things to look at."

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