Did Tsukiji close? No — and the real story is better than the headline.

TL;DR

1935–2018: the 83-year market that was born from a disaster

The market that “closed” in 2018 was itself the product of a forced move. Tokyo's fish trade spent roughly three centuries at Nihonbashi, next to Edo Castle — by 1664 there were 210 wholesalers there. Then the Great Kantō earthquake of 1 September 1923 burned the Nihonbashi uogashi to the ground, and by December that year a temporary city fish market was trading on borrowed navy land at Tsukiji. The permanent Tokyo City Central Wholesale Market opened on the site in February 1935.

1. 1603The Nihonbashi fish market takes shape near Edo Castle in the early Edo period — “a thousand ryō a morning at the uogashi”.
2. 1923The Great Kantō earthquake destroys Nihonbashi's market; a temporary fish market opens on navy land at Tsukiji in December.
3. 1935The permanent market opens in February. Its famous fan-shaped main building curls around freight-rail sidings from Shiodome — the site was designed for trains.
4. 1954Irradiated tuna from the Daigo Fukuryū Maru incident is landed, pulled from auction and buried in the market grounds — the origin of the Maguro-zuka memorial.
5. 1999After decades of outgrowing a rail-designed site (relocation was mooted by the 1960s), the TMG decides in November to relocate rather than rebuild in place.
6. 2001The December development plan fixes the destination: Toyosu, a former Tokyo Gas works site.
7. 2016Days before the planned early-November opening, Governor Koike postpones the move on 31 August — soil doubts, a cost swollen to ¥588.4 billion, poor disclosure. On 11 September it emerges the promised protective soil layer was never laid under Toyosu's main buildings.
8. 2017The expert panel rules Toyosu scientifically and legally safe in March; in June Koike announces 「築地は守る、豊洲は生かす」 — “protect Tsukiji, make use of Toyosu”. December fixes the moving date: 11 October 2018.
9. 2018Tsukiji trades for the last time on 6 October. Toyosu opens on 11 October. Demolition at Tsukiji begins the same day.

The soil politics cut both ways

The delay story is usually told as “dirty Toyosu vs clean Tsukiji”, and the Toyosu half is real: groundwater surveys from 2007 found benzene, cyanide, lead and arsenic above standards, with one 2008 benzene reading reported at 43,000 times the limit, and the 2016 revelation that a concrete-walled void — not the promised clean-soil layer — sat under the main buildings was a genuine scandal. The TMG's own investigation could not establish who decided it, or when.

One more piece of 2017 usually gets left out. When Koike announced “protect Tsukiji, make use of Toyosu” in June 2017, the “protect” half was a commitment to redevelop Tsukiji within about five years as a “food theme park” keeping market functions. That promise was quietly dropped — the TMG later characterised it as “one way of thinking” about carrying food culture into the redevelopment. The food hall planned for the FY2029 waterside complex is what remains of it.

The money, for scale

The last day — and the convoy the morning after

Saturday 6 October 2018 was the final trading day, 83 years after opening. The auction bells rang at Tsukiji for the last time that dawn. Then, on the morning of 7 October, came the image everyone who saw it remembers: several hundred turret trucks — the one-armed cargo scooters that were the market's traffic — driving in convoy 2.5 km east along the harbour roads to Toyosu. Governor Koike said at the opening ceremony that watching the line of turrets move was the moment that tightened her chest.

• The turret footnote: the ターレ (tāre) is named for Asaka Seisakusho's registered trademark “turret truck”, which fell into general use after the company's 2012 bankruptcy; the design's ancestor is generally traced to the British Lister Auto-Truck of the early 1920s. At Tsukiji many ran on petrol; at Toyosu the entire fleet is electric. (Reported counts of the Toyosu fleet differ between sources, so we won't print one.)
• Day one at Toyosu, 11 October 2018, was not smooth: Ring Road 2 was unfinished, causing serious congestion — and one turret caught fire. The road's tunnel section finally opened through the old market's ground on 18 December 2022.
• Demolition began the same day the new market opened. 155 buildings, about 260,000 m² of floor area, came down in phases — and the works ran far longer than most reporting suggests: one TMG demolition contract ran to 14 March 2025, and underground foundations and piles are still being removed.

What “Tsukiji is closing” means in 2026: ONE PARK × ONE TOWN

The headlines you see now are about the empty site. In April 2024 Tokyo selected a consortium led by Mitsui Fudosan with Toyota Realty and Yomiuri Shimbun Group Holdings; their company, Tsukiji Machizukuri Co., published the basic plan on 22 August 2025 under the concept ONE PARK × ONE TOWN. The numbers: nine buildings on about 190,000 m² of metropolitan land (the TMG keeps ownership — it's a 70-year fixed-term lease), roughly 1.26 million m² of floor area, total project cost around ¥900 billion. About 10 hectares stay open space and waterfront — that's the “ONE PARK”. The design motif is a folding fan, chosen because the demolished market building was fan-shaped.

The stadium, and the “50,000 vs 57,000” non-conflict: the centrepiece is an indoor, all-weather multi-purpose venue of about 50,000 capacity — that's the headline figure in the developer's and TMG's own documents. Chuo City's briefing, drawn from the operator's material, carries the fuller sentence: convertible between 20,000 and 57,000 seats depending on use. Both figures are official; 57,000 is the maximum seated configuration, not a contradiction.

What you can still see — the free relic circuit

There is no memorial park and no viewing platform, but the physical survivors cluster within a few minutes of each other, and the walk costs ¥0. Our route estimate (mapped, not stopwatch-timed): roughly 45–75 minutes.

• The Kaikōbashi parent pillars 海幸橋 — the best surviving object, and almost nobody photographs it. Four columns from the 1927 bridge that was the market's water gate: two in curving Amsterdam-School steel, two in granite. The bridge body was removed in 2002; three pillars plus the construction drawings were registered as Chuo City tangible cultural property on 1 April 2003. They stand unfenced on the public pavement outside Namiyoke Inari — unlabelled in English, so you'd walk past without this paragraph. Don't climb or sit on them.
• Namiyoke Inari Shrine — the market's own guardian shrine, with the trade associations' memorial mounds (sushi, egg, fish — memorials, not exhibits). Full story on the shrine & temple page.
• The view over the site: the 3rd-floor terrace of the Tsukiji Uogashi building looks straight across the cleared ground, free, on market trading days; Kachidoki Bridge gives the wide press-photo angle with Ginza's towers behind. The Ōedo Line's “Tsukijishijō” station sign, shot with the empty lot behind it, is the visual joke that explains this whole page.
• What's under the ground is the newest part of the story. Full excavation since July 2025 has exposed the base of a Meiji-era Siemens-type crucible steelmaking furnace from the naval arsenal, brick naval storehouse foundations, and stonework believed to be the pond wall of Yokuon-en 浴恩園, Matsudaira Sadanobu's lost tidal garden — all sealed beneath the market floor for 83 years. Experts have recommended relocating and preserving the furnace base; no display location or date is announced.
• And one relic you will NOT find here: the Maguro-zuka マグロ塚, the memorial to the irradiated tuna buried in the market grounds after the 1954 Daigo Fukuryū Maru incident. Because of the move and the redevelopment, its stone currently sits beside the Daigo Fukuryū Maru Exhibition Hall at Yumenoshima, about 8 km away; a campaign to bring it back to Tsukiji was still running as of June 2026. Don't go looking for it in the lanes.

Should you take a guide? For this circuit, honestly, no — it's short, flat, free and unticketed, and the scarce commodity is the story, which you now have. Where a guide genuinely earns it is stitching both halves into one morning: the pre-dawn Toyosu auction logistics are the hard part, and a combined market walk teaches the split by showing it. The one we'd point to: Private Toyosu & Tsukiji Market Adventure with Tuna Auction (★ 4.8 · 268 reviews · ~$151) — best for market-systems and architecture people who want the before-and-after in a single sweep, with the 5 a.m. problem solved for them. Everyone else: walk it yourself, then spend the money on a food tour or browse the market walks. Tour data captured 2 Aug 2026 — the booking page is the truth.

The stale-source wall

This topic has a uniquely high error rate because 2018 froze a thousand itineraries. Specimens, verified against primary sources on 2 August 2026:

And our own confession: the redevelopment chapter above will rot too. Its facts are a plan mid-assessment. That's why every schedule line here carries the “published schedule” label and a verification date, and why we check against the TMG's versioned fact sheet rather than headlines.

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