hour can be difficult. The auctions may also be off limits, as the market often places temporary bans or restrictions on tourists (both foreign and Japanese) in certain parts in response to complaints from the merchants that the visitors disrupt their work. Visitors are strongly advised to check the official market Web site (www.tsukiji-market.or.jp) before planning a trip and to make a note of how to behave properly while in the market. Later risers may wish to visit from around 8:30 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., before the market begins to wind down for the day. This is usually a safe time to avoid the visitor restrictions. As late as 1:00 p.m. there may still be plenty of activity, though the work day there is coming to an end.
Restaurants in the small streets that make up the Outer Market area (to the north of the main market) serve the freshest of fish at prices far more affordable than in the restaurants of nearby Ginza and so are a great place to stop for breakfast or an early lunch. Some of the restaurants have English menus for tourists, but as most are there to serve the market’s workers, you may need to rely on picture menus or the plastic food mock-ups in the shop windows to place your order.
2 HAMA DETACHED PALACE GARDEN
On leaving the front gate of the Inner Market (to the west), one is opposite the plant and offices of the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, where guided tours can be arranged. A ten-minute walk to the southwest along the street in front of the market—a street that gradually curves to the right—brings one to the entrance of the Hama Detached Palace (Hama Rikyu) grounds, now a public park. (Open daily from 9:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. but closed for the New Year holidays; entry ¥300.). The Hama Palace grounds originally belonged to a Matsudaira lord who filled in a portion of the bay to create wharves and warehouses to hold the rice he brought in from his Nagoya estates, the sale of which was to offset the expense of maintaining the clan’s Edo mansion. The Matsudaira daimyo eventually gave the land to the sixth Tokugawa shogun, Ienobu, who in 1709 erected a villa and created gardens filled with pavilions, pine trees, cherry trees, and duck ponds. Unlike his predecessor shogun, who forbade the killing of any animals, Ienobu loved duck hunting, and thus there were three duck ponds in the grounds. The large pond in the garden was a tidal pond whose waters were continually cleansed by the flow of the tides. A floodgate still controls the filling and cleansing of the ponds by the tide.
At the end of the Tokugawa’s rule over Japan, the grounds were taken over by the Meiji Foreign Ministry. The shogun’s villa was burned, but it was restored in 1869 when a brick building with a veranda was built to house guests of state. It was here that former president Grant of the United States and his wife stayed on their visit to Japan in 1879. Emperor Meiji had his first carriage ride to the Detached Palace for his visit to Grant, and the emperor and the president held conversations (through interpreters, of course) in a pavilion, a “floating” teahouse set in the midst of one of the ponds. This official guesthouse did not prove to be a success, however, and guests were soon put up in the new Rokumeikan opposite Hibiya Park. With ownership transferred to the Imperial Household Agency in time, the grounds continued to be used for outdoor parties for Meiji nobles and for receptions for foreign guests. The original brick guesthouse was later removed.
New Tokyo and old: Hama Rikyu’s Nakajima teahouse and Shiodome’s skyscrapers
The Hama Detached Palace passed to the city of Tokyo after 1945, and it was turned into a public park the next year. Stands for snacks and a midday repast are available on the grounds of the garden. The 60-acre (24-hectare) park still holds a lovely tidal pond, which is spanned by staggered bridges shaded by wisteria-covered trellises. Of the three ponds in the garden, two are now fenced-in as nature and duck preserves. The pine-bordered shores of the ponds and cherry trees that flower in the spring add charm to the garden. The pavilion on an island in the middle of the larger pond, reminiscent of the one where the emperor and the president met in 1879, has been rebuilt with its veranda “floating” on the pond. A path along the northern side of the park leads to a pier where a water bus may be taken up the Sumida River to the Azumabashi bridge or to Asakusa. The boats leave from 9:50 a.m. to dusk for a 35-minute trip. The waterway at the Hama Detached Garden where the boats dock is enclosed with flood walls with floodgates, which can be closed in times of exceedingly high tides. Where once the park faced out of the bay, today it confronts one of the large man-made islands that have lengthened the Sumida River, which now flows in front of the park.
3 TSUKISHIMA ISLAND
Returning on foot to Tsukiji-Shijo subway station and taking the Oedo Line a quick two stops to the southeast leads to Tsukishima Station, the starting point of the next stage of this tour. As was mentioned earlier, in 1615 the recently established successor to Ieyasu as Tokugawa shogun had several motives for installing fishermen in this location. To begin with, the fishermen of Tsukuda in the Osaka area had assisted Ieyasu before 1603, and thus they were due a reward. They were therefore brought to these reclaimed mud flats at the entrance to the bay at Edo, an area that would grow as the bay was gradually filled in. Tsukuda-jima (Island of Cultivated Rice Fields) originally consisted of two mud flats at the mouth of the Sumida River. In the early 1600s they were developed into two islands, the northern one being named Ishikawa-jima, since it was granted to Ishikawa Hachizaemon, the controller of the shogun’s ships. The southern island became Tsukudajima, named for the fishermen’s original home near Osaka. It was not until 1872 that the two islands were joined, and then in 1893 reclaimed mud flats to their south created the present large Tsukishima Island. The old fishermen’s quarter has a branch of the Sumida River on its western side, while a narrow canal still exists on its northern and eastern sides. Its southern side has had its waterway filled in and replaced by the elevated highway leading to the bridge to Tsukiji.
The shogun’s appreciation for past favors was not of the essence in this move, however. These fishermen were skilled in their trade, and they supplied the whitebait from the bay that garnished the shogun’s tables. They fished in the dark of the night, burning firewood in metal baskets at the stern of their boats so as to attract the fish. As excellent watermen and navigators, they offered another purpose for the shogun: they could recognize any strange boats in the bay and thus serve as spies for the better protection of Edo and the shogun against any potential hostile forces. (A later shogun in 1715 enhanced his intelligence gathering by bringing skilled gardeners to Edo from Kii Province. Not only could they garden, but they were adept at entering the gardens of dissident daimyo by night and carrying out the shogun’s less than charitable missions.)
One of the attractions of the island for Tokyo residents through the years has been the odor of soy sauce permeating the air here, for the fishermen developed a culinary delight by simmering fish in sea weed and soy sauce. Preserved in this boiled-down sauce along with salt, tsukuda-ni became a much desired delicacy. The island was known as well for a less happy association, for in the 1790s Matsudaira Sadanobu used it for a detention center for ronin (masterless samurai) who had lost their lord and thus their employment—as well as for vagrants. Both of these groups had become a political problem for the shogun, since they were often at the heart of brawls and riots. In a sense, what was being attempted was a halfway house where vagrants could be taught a trade. Later, for the 15 years after 1870, a prison was established here; it was subsequently removed to Sugamo in the Ikebukuro area. Three things remain of interest on the island, the Sumiyoshi Shrine, the old houses of the fishing village, which are all too quickly disappearing, and the River City 21 project that has been created in a former industrial area of the island.
The Sumida River with Tsukishima Island and the River City 21 skyscrapers on the right.
We begin with the third of these attractions, River City 21. It has been indicated that once there were two islands, Ishikawajima and Tsukuda-jima, which are now joined. The former Ishikawa-jima is the northern half of the present island. Here the shogun’s master of ships had his land in the 17th century, and
