Tokyo's food day runs backwards: it starts in the dark at the fish market and ends, many hours and many small plates later, on a stool at an izakaya counter.
Set an alarm you will regret and be at the outer market by 6am, while the tuna auctions at the inner market (visible only from a viewing platform now, not the floor) are still running. The outer market's narrow lanes are for eating, not just looking: a knife-sharp slice of tamago on a stick, a bowl of uni so fresh it barely needs the rice under it, coffee poured by a vendor who has been doing this since before you were born.
By midday the crowds thin and the smart move is a nap, because the real meal starts after dark. Izakaya are not restaurants in the Western sense — you graze, you order in waves, you let the counter cook decide what's good tonight. Ask for omakase at a yakitori counter and you'll get the parts of the chicken you didn't know you wanted: knee cartilage, tail, skin grilled until it shatters.
Do at least one night in a standing bar (tachinomi) near a train station, where salarymen drink cheap sake and everyone is gone in forty minutes. It is the opposite of the reverence of the fish market and just as essential to understanding how Tokyo actually eats.
