It's a matter of personal preference whether anyone enjoys a visit to a fish market like Tsukiji. That's entirely separate from its commercial and cultural sign

It's a matter of personal preference whether anyone enjoys a visit to a fish market like Tsukiji. That's entirely separate from its commercial and cultural significance. You mentioned NYC has a similar scale to Tsukiji market - I don't think that's true. Although Fulton Fish Market is the world's second largest and the most important in the US, it handles about 200M pounds of fish annually vs Tsukiji's 1.6B pounds. Tsukiji handles almost an order of magnitude more fish. When you start diving into the diversity and quality of product available, they aren't even comparable. Japan eats about 10% of the world's catch. Tsukiji is the Silicon Valley of seafood. Network effects and supply and demand mean Japan has more access to higher quality product than anywhere else in the world. Whether seeing a dead fish on ice is interesting or not is up to you.