For all the hype drawing people to this place, it certainly puts a fishy taste in your mouth when you leave. When you finally make it out to the fabled fish market, where fish are bought and sold in quantities unrivaled, there are a couple of shops and a small window where you can view a sliver of the action from far away. That's right, you don't even have access to the actual fish market at all! Only the surrounding sushi restaurants and some fish accessory stores (like knife shops and produce). Terrible feeling when you spend an hour venturing all the way to the world reknown fish market and they slap a visitor tag around your neck and tell you you can't go to the market itself, viewing it only through a slit pictured below. Meanwhile "professionals" are allowed to go in, with all their tourist bags and luggage because they are Japanese and just say they are there on official business. Pretty racist in my opinion, that they would so easily allow Japanese folks in, but automatically reject all western tourists at sight. Edit: We passed 3 gaurds: one making sure we took the visitors pass, one to check your tag once you were in, and one gaurd who allows Japanese people to take their visitor tags off and proceed to the fish market as "professionals".