Thursday Morning, October 13, 2005

Thursday morning started with a 4AM wake-up call and I was downstairs in the lobby with Marilyn Pineda, another JMFM participant from Comanche, Oklahoma by 5AM. A few minutes after that, we were joined by another teacher and we were in a taxi and headed for the Tokyo Fish Market. The taxis here are very clean, and all the taxi drivers are very well dressed - nice dress shirts and ties. They all wear white gloves, I'm not sure why, but the police men wear white gloves also! Although it was only 5:30 AM, we could tell we were approaching the Fish Market because all of a sudden we noticed people, cars, motorized scooters, and loading equipment everywhere. The Fish Market itself is is a large building and one of the most amazing things to me was that it did NOT smell fishy. Most of the fish there are frozen and many are still alive. It was a blur of activity and you had to be most attentive to what was going on around you or you would end up getting run over by some type of motorized vehicle. The actual fish auction goes on in the very back of the Market. There are large fish - tuna, mostly, and they are all on pallets with numbers written on them. They people who are there are to buy, stand around the auctioneer and he begins the process. Since it was all in Japanese, I could not tell what was going on exactly, but the process moved very quickly and everyone seemed to know what to do. As soon as a section's auction was over, workmen quickly swarmed in with large fish hooks and loaded the fish onto pallets with wheels (similar to our wheelbarrows) and delivered the fish to either the buyer's booth in the fish market or to one of the many waiting trucks. I was most amazed that it wasn't an overwhelming fish smell!! One interesting thing that happened was that as I was walking past one of the booths, a man was writing prices on a piece of paper to put on the displays and I smelled his magic marker. It smelled just like all the magic markers we use in our room and I thought, how ironic that I have travelled all this distance and here I am in the Tokyo Fish Market at 5:30 AM and the I smell I most notice is one that reminds me of home!