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Class Field Trip (1974)

We had to rendezvous and assemble before dawn because what happens at the world’s largest fish market – Tsukiji – is over and done with by 7 a.m. The market opens most mornings at 3 a.m., with the auctions beginning around 5:15 a.m. This is seafood and fish that is, literally, FOB – fresh off the boat.

The “inner market” is where all the auction action is. It is the wholesale market, where approximately 900 licensed wholesale dealers operate small stalls and is also where most of the processing of the fish take place. Tsukiji auctioneers handle more than 400 different types of seafood, from cheap seaweed to the most expensive caviar, from tiny sardines and wriggling eels to 600 lb. behemoth tuna.

The original site for the fish mongers during the Edo and Meiji eras was at Nihonbashi, now a fashionable banking and finance district. After the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, the fish market was relocated to its present site at Tsukiji along the shore of Tokyo Bay. [Photography by Steve Sundberg]