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For months, the Tokyo I saw was the view from my bedroom window.
My desk overlooks a sea of apartment buildings and office towers, and the main changes I observed while working from home were in the sky, as it cycled from crisp blue to puffy clouds that appeared drawn from an anime film to dark and stormy and back again.
Now, whenever I have the chance to go out into the city, I am hyper-attuned to what has changed, and what, despite all that the world has endured over the past year and a half, remains the same.
This was supposed to be the summer when tens of thousands of foreign visitors descended on Tokyo for the Olympics. Instead, with international — and ultimately domestic — spectators banned, the Games were staged in hermetically sealed bubbles, with the city outside barely showing any sign that the largest spectacle on the international sports calendar was taking place here.
Even so, despite the “state of emergency” that was in place in Tokyo for weeks, office workers in white shirts and black trousers still disgorged from the subways, albeit all wearing masks. Lines formed at lunchtime at food trucks parked outside office buildings, and people sat in cafes, hunched over their cell phones.
On a summer morning, I boarded the subway to Tsukiji, the site of Tokyo’s former wholesale fish market. When that famed market moved to a new location in 2018, a retail section aimed primarily at tourists remained open.
Tsukiji is close to the office building where the Tokyo bureau of The New York Times worked before the pandemic, and we occasionally ventured to the market for a sushi lunch.
Sometimes I wandered over to one of the many stalls to buy dried fruit or nuts or tea leaves, or to meet a friend or source for a cup of coffee. Back then, popping into the market meant forging through a mob of tourists wielding selfie sticks and ogling the fishmongers’ wares. If we arrived too late into the lunch hour, the lines for the sushi restaurants could entail long waits.
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But Japan’s borders have been closed to overseas tourists since early 2020. Now, as I wandered down the familiar alleys, hardly anyone was there.
I walked past one fish stall after another, their freezers brimming with beautiful cuts of tuna and salmon alongside whole squids, octopus legs, sea urchins in their shells and overflowing plastic bowls of salmon roe. Few customers were buying. At a butcher shop, the workers trimming fat off chicken breasts outnumbered the pair of customers at the counter. Plump peaches, priced at 800 yen each — more than $7 — sat waiting for a sale.
At many of the stands, the workers looked forlorn. Out front of several restaurants, large signs adorned with colorful photographs designed for tourists who cannot read Japanese advertised shimmering tuna rice bowls or luxury sushi sets. Servers shouted, “Welcome! Would you like to try some sushi? It’s delicious!”
Before being hammered by the coronavirus, Tsukiji had already undergone one seismic change with the departure of the wholesale market after 83 years. That section of the market has been transformed into a bus depot, used for the Tokyo Olympics. The Games, once much anticipated, ended up being quite controversial as organizers pushed ahead in the face of public opposition and a new wave of coronavirus cases in Tokyo. As a journalist, I had the odd privilege of being one of the few people actually allowed to see the competitions live, watching athletes wave to their families on video screens and listening to the eerie soundtrack of piped-in applause in empty stadiums.
When I visited Tsukiji another day, in the middle of an unseasonal rainstorm in August, most of the stores were closed for a regular day off. I saw a vision of what it could become: washed out, empty, boarded up.
But another day, in search of a stand that sold flavored mochi that my daughter used to love, I wandered to the end of an alley. It wasn’t the stand my daughter remembered, but it was a new one, selling mochi in multiple flavors.
The owner told me he had just opened up shop two months earlier. “Wow,” I said. “You are brave to start a business here now.”
“We figure this is the bottom,” Hisanori Hori, 45, told me. “It can only go up from here.”
Mr. Hori said he had previously worked at the wholesale fish market and at a vegetable stand inside Tsukiji. “I love it when it is crowded and bustling,” he said. “It is very lonely without people right now. But we can only endure, and we will work hard.”
I bought some chocolate, strawberry, and cafe au lait flavored mochi. And I told Mr. Hori I would be back.
