A Photobook of the People of Tsukiji

Watch the tuna auction at Toyosu and one thought tends to arrive: it is very clean.

The floor is bright, the aisles are wide, and you are looking down through glass from a purpose-built viewing deck. It is safe, hygienic and extremely well organised. What it is not is the mess that Tsukiji used to be.

If it is the mess you wanted, there is a book.

The Book

Tsukiji Ichiba no Hitobito: Saigo no Ninenkan wo Toru (『築地市場の人々　最後の二年間を撮る』, “The People of Tsukiji Market: Photographing the Last Two Years”) by Tomokazu Yamashita, published by Kokusho Kankōkai on 20 May 2022. It is A4 format, 184 pages, at ¥4,620 including tax. ISBN 978-4-336-07369-3.

It is exactly what the title says: the final two years of the old Tsukiji market. According to the publisher, Yamashita went back to the market roughly seventy times over those two years.

The Subject Is Not the Fish

That is the thing that makes this book worth carrying home.

There are plenty of photobooks about tuna and about fish markets. What this one recorded — in the publisher’s own words — is the intensity, the heat, the atmosphere, the connections between people, and the vitality of the people who worked there. Yamashita writes that the people of Tsukiji carried real pride and confidence in their work.

• The way an intermediate wholesaler cuts the tail to read the flesh
• The wet floor after an auction has finished
• How narrow the aisles were, with turret trucks coming through
• Voices, steam, rubber boots

Almost none of that is reachable from a viewing deck.

→ Related: Toyosu Market Tuna Auction: How the Free Lottery Actually Works

About That A4 Format

This book is A4. It is big.

For a photobook that is the obvious choice, but as something to carry home it deserves a plain warning: 184 pages at A4 has real weight and thickness. Plan on laying it flat in the bottom of a suitcase rather than carrying it on board.

In exchange, the photographs are printed large — which matters, because the subject is people’s faces and hands. A book like this in a small format would defeat itself.

Why It Travels Well

• These photographs cannot be taken again — the old market closed in October 2018
• Effectively unavailable outside Japan — it was published for the domestic market
• It lands harder after Toyosu — the newer the building you have just seen, the more you want the older one
• Words are barely needed — it is a photobook, so most of it reads without Japanese

One Honest Warning

The captions and text are in Japanese only, and there is no English edition. For a photobook that is a small loss, but it is a real one if you want the context behind each picture.

And at ¥4,620, this is a normal price for a photobook but not a cheap souvenir. It suits the “if I buy one book, this is the one” approach rather than a stack of small gifts.

Price and Where to Buy

Bookshops with a serious photography section sometimes stock it — Kinokuniya in Shinjuku, Tsutaya Books in Ginza, and the larger Shibuya bookshops are the easiest places to look.

How to Have It Delivered to Your Tokyo Hotel

Amazon Japan and Rakuten can both deliver your order directly to the hotel where you are staying. Ordering a few days before your flight home works well — you can simply receive the package at the front desk. When you order, please set the shipping address to your hotel, and add the hotel name and your guest name as it appears on the reservation.

• Please check with your hotel in advance that they accept packages for guests
• On Amazon.co.jp, the English display toggle is at the top right of the screen. Rakuten is a Japanese-language site, so your browser’s translation feature is the easy way through

Tsukiji Still Exists

Worth saying plainly: the Tsukiji outer market is still open and trading. What closed in 2018 was the inner wholesale market.

So the natural route still works — watch the auction at Toyosu at dawn, then cross town and have breakfast in the Tsukiji outer market. Open this book afterwards and you are looking at the same place name at a different time.

Who Is This For?

Anyone who came away from Toyosu thinking they had expected something rougher. And anyone more interested in the people doing the work than in the market itself — this is a book about a job, not about fish.

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