Looking left and right, I carefully stepped into the maelstrom. Luckily, or maybe by design, the carts' propane-powered engines made enough noise so that I could hear them coming. Keeping a careful lookout, and using my best sidestep when necessary, I made my way across the open space and into the parking lot, which was also hectic, but it was at least organized chaos and I made it to the building intact.

The front of the market was about 100 yards wide and completely open, with people coming and going in all directions. Standing outside in the bright sunlight, my eyes could make out nothing but the shadowy moving images of people, and a collection of tables that appeared to be covered with containers of what I could only assume to be fish.

I moved inside and carefully picked my way through the people. As my eyes began to adjust I became aware of the scale of the building. Now, I knew that the Japanese ate a lot of fish, and I had heard that this was the largest fish market in the world, but the sheer size of the hall and the variety of fish offered for sale was far greater than I had imagined.

The warehouse was as deep as it was wide with only floor-to-ceiling columns interrupting the space. A grid pattern of six-foot wide aisles divided the floor area, all crammed with people examining the seafood in the small booths down each passageway. There were at least a hundred stalls here offering everything from standard (recognizable) fish, to things that I had neither considered eating nor even conceived of as edible. Most booths specialized in one type of seafood, including tuna, roe, seaweed, a staggering variety of clams, octopus, squid and squid ink, crustaceans and many things that I could not identify. The whole place was a palette of color. There were pink, red, gray/green, black, blue, and white colored fish. There were fish of muted colors contrasting with bright red, orange, and yellow roe. Bare lightbulbs hung from the steel girders above, casting a sparkling, moist, glassy sheen onto the fish.

As I walked deeper inside I was constantly amazed by the quantity and variety of the goods for sale. Every booth seemed to offer something new and different. I wandered up and down, aisle after aisle, turning left or right as something caught my eye. Being totally enthralled by the visual assault, it was a few minutes before I became aware of the smell, or more precisely the lack of a smell. Despite what must have been tons of fish and other seafood crammed into the space, there was almost no smell of fish. This was truly fresh fish, barely off the boat. This brought back to my mind something a Japanese friend had once said to me, "To really appreciate sushi and sashimi, they must be eaten before noon."

The hustle and bustle in the aisles was a constant concern. The blue carts were back, transporting goods between booths and the trucks in the parking lot. Customers were moving from stall to stall, examining goods and making purchases. Buyers and sellers greeted each other with polite pleasantries and a bow, and then got down to business. Some booths were drawing small crowds watching the people engaged in spirited discussions as they bought and sold fish.