Reporting from Tokyo — For workers at the popular Tsukiji fish market, the final indignity may have been when the intoxicated British tourist licked the head of a frozen tuna.
In the now-notorious incident, captured by a Japanese TV crew, an irate market official shouted in English, "Get out! Get out!" as the man patted the tuna's gills.
Every day, hundreds of sightseers gather in the predawn gloom to witness one of the most popular events on the Tokyo tourist agenda: the daily tuna auction. Clogging busy travel arteries, tourists gawk at the sheer size of a market as big as 43 football fields. Each year it handles tens of millions of visitors and 600,000 tons of seafood in 480 varieties -- 1 of every 5 fish caught on the planet.
But some visitors misbehave (one tipsy female tourist stripped naked as her male friends hauled her around on a wooden handcart used by wholesalers), infuriating market officials so much they recently closed Tsukiji (pronounced skee-jee) to outsiders for several weeks during the busy New Year's buying season.
Lighting a stubby Hope-brand cigarette, fish cutter Saito Shiro says many foreigners don't respect his profession.
"They get in the way," says the 75-year-old Tokyo resident, who has worked in the market for more than half a century. "They walk around without paying attention to their surroundings."
The market relented in January, but the mood is still a bit frosty in the series of drafty warehouses that make up the market, where tourist Bart Brinkman says he feels like a fish out of water.
"I don't blame them," says the 37-year-old export consultant from the Netherlands, already wide-eyed as he wanders the market at 5 a.m. "These people are very serious about their work. I wouldn't want tourists running around my business."
All around him, sullen men in baseball caps zip about on motorized three-wheeled carts, taking corners like New York cabdrivers. Others in rubber aprons and boots brush past with flashlights and large fishhooks, pointy ends facing outward.
Their message: Stay out of my way or pay the price.
Now that the crowds have returned, the debate has too: Can tourists be trusted in Tsukiji?
The issue symbolizes the culture clash between foreign visitors and residents of a nation that prizes manners and orderliness.
