journal features

tsukiji is 70 years old

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-eight years and a million words

Tokyo, 2010.02.11

My favourite fish market just turned 70 years old.

wrapping up after a busy morning

According to a newspaper article, it was set up in its current place after a disaster wiped out the former one. The current site is now laden with problems: crowding (I can attest to that, having been through the thing at a snails pace on many occasions); 400 traffic accidents a year (I was knocked off my bike there two years ago by a careless driver); heavy metals and toxins all around (!); and a crumbling infrastructure that has caused blocks of concrete and chunks of metal to fall from the main buildings.

a quiet corner of the giant fish market

Time to move. Needless to say, different levels of government are fighting over what can be done about getting the market to a new home. And nothing much else is happening. So it's business as usual in the filthy, polluted, crowded, dangerous and wonderful Tsukiji. Happy birthday, fish market!

traffic cops required

rand()m quote

It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat.

—Theodore Roosevelt, Jr.