Visiting a Fish Market (And dying of heat stroke)
So our first full day of exploring Tokyo was definitely something interesting- we visited the Japanese Burj Khalifa, saw a few religious sites, the biggest collection of mice and headphones on Earth (enough to give my little brother a run for his money). Can everything from today beat that?
Maybe. I guess we’ll see soon enough. We started out by walking out to get breakfast that morning, which this time consisted of another batch of gas station food for everyone- instead of visiting the 7-eleven this time, however, we went to another one just across the street, which had about the same level of options. This time, I got a plastic box with rice, a limited amount of meat (which I think is pork but I don’t remember), some vegetables (which I didn’t touch lol), and an egg. It was actually pretty good, and I enjoyed it very thoroughly until someone else who was staying in the hotel sat down near us and began smoking. Given what happened in my high school bathroom during my freshman year, I temporarily lost my appetite after that.
But I’d get it back soon, because we were now headed to our first location, the Tsukiji Fish Market. This required a fairly longer ride in the Tokyo Metro, but everything we’d be able to see after was completely worth the wait. When we came out on the other side, we were in an entirely different part of the city. There were tall buildings that reached the clouds in every direction you looked, but I didn’t recognize anything. The Sky Tree was nowhere to be seen, possibly because there were buildings blocking it. Checking the map, we’d traveled quite a significant distance across the major part of Tokyo. Our parents navigated the streets, prompting us to travel even further in the direction we’d been headed in until we reached the alleyways of the Tsukiji Fish Market.
And as you might expect from the name, there were a lot of fish there. There was fish on every alley, and in most of the stalls. There were quite a lot of stalls selling other commodities like other types of meat, but most of them revolved around food in some form. This place had a lot of options- about everything one could want.
We immediately began checking out the stalls- we obviously had no time to really explore every single one, because this market went on and on for three or four blocks, but we did manage to get a sample of quite a few things at the market. We found at the alley where we entered there was a stall selling lots of different kind of meat, which we managed to get a sample from. A lot of these stalls not only showed the meat, but they also showed the process of meat, where you could get a front row view of the people who ran the stalls cooking up the meat at really high temperatures.
Speaking of really high temperatures, it was incredibly hot that day. My skin was on fire that morning, I was sweating a river- no, probably an ocean, and there was nowhere in the market that you could cool off at. We’d planned for high temperatures like these before, such as when we were in Vietnam/Thailand in 2023 and brought these headphone shaped cooling devices that helped cool your neck, but because I’d lost one of them on a tuk-tuk in Thailand (it fell off my neck in the wind and is probably lying somewhere there now) Casey and I were forced to just share one.
Sharing one was not easy, especially in this weather. Casey ended up occupying it for most of the way down to the market, but once we reached it, I yanked it off his neck when he wasn’t looking and took it for myself.
We also found an ice cream shop in the market which sold about twenty flavors of local ice cream. Each of us picked a flavor and took a bowl (I’m pretty sure I chose blueberry) and we all enjoyed it- it helped to cool our bodies to a considerable extent, and it tasted really good, but once we finished it and threw it in the trash and continued to walk through the alleyways, all the kids went right back to complaining about how incredibly hot it was and how we just wanted air conditioning. A few times as we stepped through the market, we would occasionally find a stall with air conditioning that we’d take a rest in for a moment or two before continuing on to check the next ones.
There was also a lot of advertisement in the Fish Market. About once every fifteen stalls or so, someone would come out and present us personally their options and foods. They had quite a lot to boast about, and on top of that many of them also had these very professional looking brochures that they handed out to people, which showed all of their mouth-watering products. After walking for close to forty minutes, Derek, Casey and I were hungry and hot, so our parents agreed to take us to one of the restaurants that had offered us a brochure earlier. They were very well known for some really good meat options, but the best part about it was the AC it had.
As soon as we entered the restaurant, I had a blast of cold air in my face, and immediately afterwards I noticed how fancy this place was. The entire area had really nice tables, but as we sat in our own table, I noticed in the very far back there were actually these sizable private rooms with traditional tables that others were eating at. They seemed like a really fun and exciting experience to get, but we ended up just choosing the tables. After ordering our food, we actually had to wait close to an hour to get it, but oh boy, the wait was so… worth it. After around thirty minutes of waiting, the first bits of food came- a bowl of rice and a few exotic sauces and salts.
But the real star of the meal was this singular bowl of wagyu meat- as soon as the people working at the restaurant came around to serve us that, I knew I was in for a treat. They put the bowl right over one of those little portable cooking devices that we had on our table and we were able to watch it cook right then and there. My first bite into this thing was really tasty- it was probably the most intense piece of meat I’ve ever had. It literally melts in your mouth. Definitely recommend getting wagyu in Japan.
The only issue with the meat was that it was a little too intense. The first few bites are amazing, but after a while it really started to attack my stomach- I finished the whole thing because it was really good, but my stomach would not thank me for eating this later on.
With that wonderful meal in mind, we left the restaurant and immediately set out to our next attraction, which was the one place everyone had been waiting for.
TeamLab PLANET
Casey’s excitement for this place was genuinely unmatched. When we ranked all the places in the city that we were most excited for, the first thing that popped up in Casey’s little brain was the TeamLabs PLANET visit. You probably recognize that name, and if you don’t you’ve definitely seen the pictures of this place from the Internet.
This is the place in Tokyo that shows you all the images that make you feel like you’re in another universe. It’s probably the best art museum you’ve seen. You remember seeing those edits on the Internet of Tokyo’s facility with all the rooms creating those fancy colorful illusions? This is that place. Oh boy, we were all really excited for it, but nobody was more excited than Casey.
We did have a bit of a walk to get there, and it was certainly tiring, but the first part was more bearable since we all remembered to eat in an air conditioned part of the market. We left the market and immediately began walking down the street in the direction of Team Labs, which was a short distance of walking away. To speed things up, we did actually take a bus ride to get to the facility a little faster. Once we got off the bus, we quickly realized we’d accidentally gotten off on the wrong stop and actually had to travel somewhere else and we’d gotten off one stop early, but it wasn’t much to walk so we chose to walk the rest of the way instead.
It turns out that the TeamLabs PLANET place is actually located next to a river, and we’d have to cross a bridge to reach it. Looking at the Google Maps picture, the river doesn’t seem so big at all, but holy crap, it’s sooooo much bigger than it looks:
The view is amazing, and we had twenty minutes of crossing the bridge to look over it. This thing is genuinely huge- either we were slow walkers because of the heat, or the walking distance was large. Once we reached the other side of the river, it was a very short walk until we reached the front of the TeamLab Planets facility, which given how incredibly high-tech it seemed, was actually not as big as you would think. I mean, sure, it’s definitely quite sizable for a building. It’s certainly larger than a mansion, but compared to some of the other crazy skyscrapers I’d seen and especially the Sky Tower, it looked a little more like your average old office building.
It turns out, the insides of the building were anything but average.
Most of the stuff on the outside had the things you’d expect in a regular tourist attraction. This included a few concession stands that offered drinks and snacks, the regular sign up area, and a bench for people to sit on. This bench doesn’t exactly look like a regular bench, though…
Once we finished our drinks, we went inside to check out the crazy facilities that it had. Before we could enter, they began with a waiting room where they played a video for us. Afterwards, we entered the locker room, which we could use to keep all our stuff inside, which was great because anything getting lost is gonna be really difficult to find in a room full of illusions. Even more importantly, some of the exhibits actually featured water on the floor that reached about as far as your legs. Given how crowded this place was, the locker area was not too big and difficult to navigate. We set our stuff inside the locker room and immediately headed to the first of two attractions.
After entering the first room of the area, we found this:
The entire place was dark, with the only exception being these blue colored lights on the floor. In this image, you can see nothing but those blue colored lights, and some people who might look at this probably would mistake this for art rather than a hallway. The floor was soft but firm – walking through this was a really interesting experience, but it was just the beginning. At the end of the blue lights hallway, we turned left and found a slightly sloped ramp that led to the next room. The room was entirely dark in that sense with the notable exception of these lights on the bottom corners of the room. Oh, and did I mention that there was a constant stream of water flowing down the ramp at all times?
As we walked up the ramp, the water gently streamed past our legs, which felt really relaxing after having walked nearly two hours across the city just to reach the TeamLabs place. Another interesting thing about this water is that… it didn’t exactly feel like regular water. Regular water is usually clear and transparent, right? Well, this water, for whatever reason, remained transparent, but had these really weird white tint to it- like it was mixed in with milk or something. I’m not sure what made the water that kind of color, but it was definitely relaxing my feet. At the very top of the ramp, we discovered this huge waterfall that was causing the consistent stream of water down the ramp.
When we reached the top of the staircase, we found a pretty normal room- because we’d gotten our feet wet in the weirdest liquid I’d ever seen on the trip, we found a whole shelf supplied with all the towels in the world that we could use to clean our feet. As we all wiped our feet, we also discovered a text that gave a little commentary and explanation on the illusions there. I took a picture of it, but the picture wasn’t very good quality, so if you’re looking for an explanation, this is how the illusion works:
This artwork is based on an earlier work on a natural waterfall in the mountains of Shikoku, Waterfall of Light Particles – Deep in the Mountains of Shikoku (2016-2017).
Light only reflects off the particles of water that make up the waterfall. The shining particles cascade down creating a waterfall of light particles. The light of the shining waterfall illuminates the surrounding area. In the darkness, the shining particles leave a light trail afterimage that appears to draw lines in space. From the combination of these afterimage light traces, the waterfall of light is born.
Once we were done wiping our feet, the room we were staying in also featured a hole that you could put your used towels into, so we disposed of them before leaving for the third attraction, which… initially, it looked like a room covered entirely with these strange pad looking things. The floor looked like one large pillow. When I stepped on it, I realized that walking on these pads wasn’t just regular walking. The floor in this room sort of sunk your foot in whenever you took a step, which made movement feel really weird.
After that room came a fairly long but empty hallway before the next piece of art. I was initially very confused on what could possibly be on the other side of the hallway, and I was even more confused about what I saw roughly halfway through the hallway- the path ended up taking a really strange fork that I couldn’t explain. To me, the second option looked like an area that might be off-limits to the public, but visibly there were no signs that restricted anyone going there. When I went inside, it was a really odd-shaped hallway. It started out by going to the left, but a few feet later it’d jerk to the right, then to the left, then to the right, so on and so on.
I thought I might as well explore the area a bit, so I entered the hallway and traveled left, right, left, right. After about six or seven turns, the hallway continued to travel in its odd shape, so I decided that since I had no idea where I was headed, I’d come back later on to see where this led to.
The next room was probably the most famous out of all the rooms in this place:
You’ve definitely seen a picture of this place.
That seemed to go on for infinity. The lights changed colors every five seconds or so, which made the place a lot more interesting. The whole room, from what I could see, is obviously not infinite, and not as big as you might think – if you look hard enough in just about any direction, you can see that the whole room is rigged with a bunch of these mirrors that together create the illusion of a room that goes on and on. All across the room are these lights which are spread out evenly across almost the entire room with the only exception being the small pathway carved out for the tourists.
As we walked through the room, I did notice there was one pretty sizable part of the wall that wasn’t mirrors at all – through all those layers of lights and glass, there seemed to be one area that the lights didn’t go. For some reason, all the lights ended right there. As we walked down the path, we approached relatively close to the area where the lights ended. I realized behind me that it was actually another area that you could walk in- I could even see people on the other side taking pictures, but I wasn’t sure how to get into that room without walking through all of the lights myself. For the time being, I decided to assume that this room was meant for reservations and ignored it for now.
As it turned out later on, it wasn’t.
We continued throughout the path along the room, which ended very abruptly by quite deliberately breaking the endlessness of the entire scene with a corridor covered in black on all sides. We entered this room and were given another long dark and dimly lit corridor that would take us to the next crazy room. I really didn’t know what to expect now – every single corridor seemed to offer something just as insane, if not more insane, than the last.
This time, we were headed to another area which featured the same milky water as before. We stepped into it again and continued down the designated path, which eventually led to this very familiar looking room.
To begin with, the room, just like all the others, had mirrors installed on every possible side of the room to give that feeling of endlessness. What was more interesting about this place, perhaps, was that on the water you could clearly see this very random selection of colored lines that seem to be heading in every direction. You’ve probably seen this:
It might be a bit hard to see in this picture, but each of those colored lines are actually meant to be virtual fish that are swimming around in the water. The lights shined on the white water create the image of a fish which genuinely looks really cool. It’s even cooler when you interact with the fish- yes, it’s possible to interact with virtual colored fish that swim all over this tiny pool. If you wiggle your feet and splash the water around one as it moves quickly through the water (You have to be a bit fast about this, because the fish are pretty quick) you can actually “kill” the fish as well. They’ll disintegrate to pieces on the spot right in the area where you kicked it to death, which is surprisingly satisfying. We spent several minutes in this room with the fish – it was mostly shaped like a box, and I could easily distinguish the entrance and exit, but I did notice that much like the hallway before the glass lights, there was one more opening that seemed a little distant from the rest of the attraction. Only a few fish hung out there, and it seemed really quiet. I made a mental note to myself that I would check it out after exploring the rest of the rooms in this attraction.
After reaching the exit of the room, we walked down another long and dark corridor to reach the next room, which might have been my favorite one. Ever seen this before?
This room definitely was something you don’t see every day. This time, the mirrors created the concept of infinity with colors on every side and a lot of these white soft balls, which were about six feet or so in diameter. Some could be moved around the room, although with some difficulty. There were also a sizable number of balls that were attached to a side or ceiling of the room- it just went on and on with more and more of these balls in every direction, with a small open space for people to hang out, but you were never more than ten feet away from a giant white ball. And just like the previous glass lights room, the whole place changed color every few minutes, which made my photo gallery look completely different every time I took a picture in this place.
The final room of this insane attraction was next, and after going through one last dark and dimly lit corridor, we found ourselves in a room that looked a little bit like this:
Okay, so unless you’ve been to this place before you probably have no idea what is going on in this picture, and I really don’t blame you. The whole thing just looks like a bunch of flowers flying through the empty void of space, so I think I’ll need to find a better way to explain this.
Basically, the entire room was shaped like a dome. The bottom of the dome is a regular glass floor, just like eighty percent of all the attractions in this place. The top of the dome, the circular part, displayed images of flowers- but here’s the interesting part: Those flowers were constantly moving in a single unified direction. When the entire dome appears to be shifting, it actually messes with your sense of orientation. Here was my initial reaction along with Derek.
Me: Oh, it’s this place. Oh, what the- (Realizes where we are) how do people find their way out of this place? I’m gonna fall over-
Derek: I feel like I’m gonna fall over because the movement makes it weird, you know?
Me: I don’t even know how to walk with this!
Derek: I feel like everything is moving in circles, bro!
Yeah, it turns out when everything around you is spinning, your sense of direction gets a little weird. My body kept on shifting to adjust to the slow movement of the all the flowers, which caused me to lose balance as I walked across the room- it took several moments after first entering the room to remember how to walk properly, and the entire time I was in this room it was quite difficult to walk straight with the illusion of movement going on all around me.
One of the best ways to enjoy the movement of the flowers floating by in the dome was to simply lie down and look up- you could see much of the flower petals moving across the screen, and it was super satisfying to watch. We spent close to twenty minutes in here. I would have taken photos, but the flower movement made everything look weird. The pictures above are complete proof of that.
We anticipated seeing another crazy attraction after this because of the dark and dimly lit corridor immediately on the other side of the flower petal dome, but it turned out that was the end, and we were right back where we started in the locker room. But we weren’t going to end the fun here yet- all of the attractions we’d seen so far were just the first of two sections in the entire facility which meant we’d only seen half of the crazy rooms in this place. As we walked towards the other side of the locker room I tried to predict what rooms I’d see next, but I actually wasn’t entirely sure. All of the really famous rooms that I was aware of were already seen, so great- this could be like a surprise round for me.
The first room of the place is actually situated outdoors, where the heat went right back to torturing us kids, but not so much now that we’d spent the past hour in an air conditioned room. It wsa decorated with these little hills of moss and grass and these odd bean-shaped glass rocks, which stood on top of and in between the hills of moss. Just like before, the glass mirrors in the very far back of the room created the general illusion of infinity. It was definitely an interesting sight.
Well, this was a really interesting room, but it was rather crowded and also outdoors (which I’m not trying to do after the heat stroke in the fish market) so we decided to head onto the next room-oh wait, what? There was no next room. If there was one, we didn’t see it (which would be really embarrassing) so we decided to go back into the first section of the TeamLabs place to check out the few details we’d missed the first time.
We started by going through the original hallway, the lit up water staircase, and the weird pillow-blanket room thingy, until we eventually found ourselves in the dark corridor that would lead to the glass lights again. Initially, we planned on continuing into the glass lights room the same way we’d done the first time, but again we found that same strange zigzag corridor that seemed to be kind of off limits. I wasn’t sure if we should go in at first- the zigzag seemed to go on forever. Before any of us could make our decision, Casey immediately rushed into the zig zag room, and we had no choice but to follow him.
The zig zag room was dimly lit in the color red, with lights lighting up the way on the bottom corners of the walls. It went on and on- left, right, left, right, left, right… eventually it jerked sharply in the direction of the right again, and this time it persisted in that direction – Casey followed down another long and dimly lit corridor, with the rest of us immediately on his trail. I don’t know what I expected to see on the other side, but it was actually a bit of a surprise to me when we ended up, once again, in the room with the glass lights. We had ended up in a different part of the vast room- everything was very similar to that of the previous corridor that we’d gone through the first time. Despite the immense size of this place, I could very vaguely see the main walkway through the glass lights room that our party had traveled through the first time- beyond all those layers of light, I could slightly process the sight of several other people.
At the very edge of the walkway, we found another hallway with nothing but black on the other side- at first, I thought it was possible that we were about to reconnect with the main passage of tourists, but it turned out we were about to find something even better. As we were approaching that strange black entrance on the other side of the walkway, I realized that the features on the other side looked too broad to simply be a hallway- the hallways were generally shaped a lot smaller. It turned out this was actually just one room- it was shaped much like a cube- the ceiling, floor, and three adjacent walls were all covered in black- the only side of that cube was connected to the light room, allowing for this stunning view- this black room was also the nearby connected corridor that I saw the first time I was going through the room.
This is what the place looked like – absolutely perfect. Something about the contrast between the bright shining lights and the darkness was really satisfying, but there was one more thing that was interesting about this place. For the most part, besides the wall of glass lights that covered one side of the box, there were no other notable features about the cube. Well, there was one exception.
On the opposite side of the cube from the shining lights wall, there was actually a control panel that allowed you to control the color and patterns of the lights, although it was fairly moderate and slow. Of course Casey eventually found his way to be the person operating this, and despite my dad telling him not to go too crazy with the control panel… yeah, you probably predicted this beforehand. He pressed the button for the option that would cause the most chaos- an absolutely blinding change in the color of the lights with the pattern that Derek and I recommended he didn’t choose.
Even after that happened, it was surprisingly easy to drag Casey off the control panel ten minutes later, and before long we were walking back through the second walkway, back towards the first, and eventually finding ourselves again in the fish room- we almost passed by it very quickly again, but before we decided to do that I wanted to see for myself what was in the third entrance to the room that I had missed beforehand. Initially, I didn’t see very much- it seemed like an empty room. It was dark, there were zero projections, and not a single fish dared to enter these waters.
It wasn’t until a few moments later that I saw what was at the end- from the ceiling of the room, water drained down in a few short lines while glowing in a very colorful way- the mirrors gave this infinite illusion once again, which looked absolutely stunning. If you look at this, you might not even be able to tell that this is even a real place on Earth – I don’t know how to explain it – but it’s about as good as art can get.
After this, there were no more interesting secret rooms or secret features to explore (At least none that I know of – let me know if I missed something important) We streamlined through the next two rooms- the room with big balls and the floating flower petal room. We ended up arriving at the locker room and regained our stuff. Our parents took us back outside after that crazy adventure to get our eyes readjusted to the light- it was now close to 5PM, and they had planned to take us further to the East to explore the land a little to the East, but at this point, things took a really weird turn.
You remember the wagyu I ate earlier before coming to the Fish Market? Well, it really started to come back to bite me after about four hours of walking around. I started to get sick again (I’m sorry. I have a weak stomach.) and immediately realizing that I was about to lose my strength, everyone agreed that they had probably done enough for the time being and that we should go back to the hotel and rest. The journey back to the hotel took nearly an hour- we had to go a very long distance through the Tokyo Metro and then a really long walk through the district of Shinjuku where our hotel was located, but I did get this sick picture along the way. I ended up resting in my hotel room the rest of the day, but I’d be back to full strength tomorrow, and we had a lot to do then…