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

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.

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 five orange shutters closed. That is the fresh tuna auction site.

8) You could take your time to have an observation of what is going on there. But very soon, a security guard wearing a blue uniform will walk up to you. Tell him in English, "tuna auction...” The guard will be very nice to hand you a map and a guide paper and show you the direction to the Tokyo government tuna auction reception place (However, right now, the tuna auction observation tour by the TMG is closed, so tell the security guard, "shopping" instead of "tuna auction." He will show you the direction of the middlemen's stores--He has to).

9) Go back to the middlemen store area at about 5:40 or 5:50. 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.

10) 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 six, they have the sushi restaurants.

11) 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 one stall and they would already have a long line already at 6:10 that you have to wait more than thirty-minutes to eat.
I recommend you to eat at Daiwa-zushi. It is four-stalls ahead from Sushi-dai, they have two stalls with brown nolens hanging down and you could eat immediately at around 6:10 on a weekday.

Good luck!

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

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 six people at the most.

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 twenty 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]
"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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