Sendai Morning Market

photo by Neuropower · CC BY-SA 3.0

Three slices of tuna belly for 650 yen, standing among the stalls; it is closed on Sundays.

A narrow covered street, five minutes from the station, with the stalls packed one against the other: fruit and vegetables, fish, dried goods, cooked food. It is not a market for tourists and it has no entrance: you go in at one end and come out at the other, among people doing their shopping for dinner. At Hamashin three slices of bluefin tuna belly cost 650 yen, a live scallop 756, an oyster in its shell 540, and you eat them there standing up; a little further on, skewers of zunda, the sweet paste of green soya beans that goes on everything in Sendai, are 150.

It began in 1945, just after the end of the war, as a small market of stalls in front of Sendai Station, which the bombing had razed to the ground: people called it ‘the open-air market’, and until the seventies goods were sold literally on the ground, in the alleys. The shopkeepers' federation was set up in 1985 and became a consortium in 1992. In Sendai they call it ‘the city's kitchen’, and it is the last neighbourhood market left in the centre; the name ‘morning market’ now only tells you where it comes from, because it is a permanent market, open from morning to evening, not a stall that packs up at midday. The fish comes from Sanriku, the coast to the north.

ℹ️ The street is public, but the market only exists during the stalls' hours: they open at around 8:00 and close between 17:00 and 18:00, each on its own schedule. Sundays and public holidays are rest days, and that is the line that ruins more visits than any other, because the market is five minutes from the west exit of JR Sendai Station and you pass by without thinking about it. It also closes for the Japanese mid-August holidays and at New Year, on dates that change from year to year; on the last day of the year, however, it is open. There is no car park. The morning is the time to go: in the afternoon many of the fish stalls have already finished. You eat standing up and there are no tables.

🚉 Sendai · 3 min walk

Sources: sentabi.jp · tohokukanko.jp · sendaiasaichi.com

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