History of the Tsukiji Fish Market

Tokyo's fish market has moved twice in a century, and both moves were forced. The first was an earthquake. The second was an argument that took seventeen years.

Tokyo's fish market, 1600s to today

Nihonbashi, and the fish market Edo actually had

For most of the Edo period the fish market was not at Tsukiji at all. It sat on the bank at Nihonbashi, a couple of kilometres north, and it was called the Uogashi — the fish quay. Fishermen licensed to supply the shogun's kitchens sold on whatever the household did not take, and a wholesale trade grew around that surplus.

The name survived every move that followed. The building at Tsukiji that houses the sixty traders who stayed is called Tsukiji Uogashi, and the word means the same thing it meant on the Nihonbashi bank three hundred years ago.

1 September 1923

The Great Kantō earthquake struck just before noon and the fires that followed did most of the damage. Nihonbashi's market was destroyed with the rest of central Tokyo.

The city had already been arguing about moving it. The district around Nihonbashi had become a business centre, and a wholesale fish market in the middle of it was increasingly hard to defend on sanitary grounds. The earthquake settled the argument.

The temporary years

Trading carried on out of provisional premises for more than a decade while the new market was built. The site chosen was Tsukiji — reclaimed ground beside the Sumida, close enough to the water for the boats and far enough from the new business district to be acceptable.

11 February 1935 — the market on reclaimed ground

The Tokyo Central Wholesale Market opened at Tsukiji on 11 February 1935. Its inner market was laid out in a fan around a curved rail spur, so that refrigerated wagons could be unloaded straight into the stalls; the shape is still legible in the road layout today.

Around it, in the streets between the market and Tsukiji Hongan-ji, a second market grew: the shops that sold to the restaurants that bought at the auctions. That is the outer market, and it is the part that is still here.

The post-war decades

Tsukiji became the largest wholesale fish market in the world by volume, handling several hundred kinds of seafood and moving thousands of tonnes a day. The pre-dawn tuna auction became the thing foreign visitors queued overnight to see, and by the 2000s the market was managing tourism as a problem of its own alongside the trade.

Why the move to Toyosu took seventeen years to argue

The decision to relocate was taken in 2001 and the move happened in 2018. The buildings were old, the refrigeration was not to modern standard and the site was needed. Against that: traders had built businesses on a particular pitch in a particular aisle, contamination was found in the soil at the Toyosu site, and remediation and testing ran for years while the argument continued in public.

The wholesale trade left in the end. The shops around it did not.

6 October 2018, and what stayed behind

Tsukiji's last trading day was 6 October 2018. Toyosu opened on 11 October 2018. Both dates are correct and they measure different things, which is why English sources quote one or the other and rarely both.

What stayed is around 460 shops in the lanes, the Uogashi building that had opened two years earlier to hold some of them, and two shrines that were here before any of it. The name stayed too, which is why the market people mean when they say Tsukiji is not the one that left.

Why the name outlived the market

The wholesale trade has now been at Toyosu for longer than most visitors realise, and almost nobody calls Toyosu “the fish market”. Tsukiji kept the name because it kept the thing a visitor came for: shops open to the public, a street you can walk down, and food cooked in front of you.

The same happened once before. The Nihonbashi Uogashi has not existed since 1923, and its name is on a building at Tsukiji. Names here attach to the trade rather than to the address, and they travel with the people who move.

Tsukiji Fish Market Tours compares every walk into these streets. The market page sets out what is in them now, and the auction page follows the trade to Toyosu. A Tsukiji market tour is the quickest way to have all of it pointed out to you.