Tsukiji Market is a foodie's delight; appreciate it with a local guide

Traditional markets are a sightseeing magnet for me, and I can seldom resist the temptation of a leisurely exploration. Whether it's the simple pleasures of farmers spreading their wares in a French village square, the sophisticated offerings in Barcelona's Boqueria or my home turf in London's Borough market, I love breathing it all in and imagining what I could cook. I've explored some exotic variations on this theme with locals ... notably Muscat's fish stalls and a sprawling tropical bazaar in Mauritius ... but I'd never felt that I required a guide until I reached Tokyo's famous Tsukiji.

Thankfully, we had Yuko. She turned what could have been a bewildering and aimless morning into a transformative experience. We thought we knew Japanese food, but after more than two weeks in the country we had to admit that our understanding was limited. And because all of our experience besides one cooking class earlier in the trip had been in restaurants, we were woefully ignorant of many of the raw ingredients that went into this alien cuisine. Yuko explained what different elements were, from where they were sourced, how they were used and what made for the highest quality. In most cases, she knew the shop owners and coaxed them into offering us samples. Her service extended to getting to know everyone's interests, both for shopping and eating, and making sure we were all satisfied.

You'll find a lot of Tsukiji tours on TripAdvisor. We selected one combined with a sushi-making class and lunch, sourced through cooking class portal Cookly. We only had 5 people in our group so it was an intimate, personalised experience.

This is not a covered or enclosed market, like all of those mentioned in my introduction, but rather a district of narrow lanes in an area just 150 metres by 250 metres, packed with about 300 different small shops. There are butchers and vegetable stalls and, as you'd expect from Japan, a lot of fishmongers.

This, in fact, was what Tsukiji used to be most famous for. Until October 2018 the district was divided into an inner and outer market, the inner being a wholesale mecca notable for its daily auctions of bluefin tuna. That market has moved 2km east to a new facility called Toyosu which, though built with visitor galleries, usually gets described by tourists as sterile and uninspiring. Other than the auctions themselves, all of the character, most interesting shops and good food stands seems to have stayed in the old place.

Part of the former inner market building is still in operation, where you can walk down an aisle of wholesale fishmongers selling a wider variety than I've seen anywhere, including a fair number of species that are still wriggling with life. (I love Tokyo-style grilled eel, with its distinctive sweet and umami brown sauce, but the sight of them writhing in styrofoam boxes sends tremors of horror up my snake-phobic spine.)

The most distinctive parts of Tsukiji are back in the outer market, however, particularly the shops selling specialist products. We stopped at one place that did nothing but katsuobushi, the paper-thin shavings of dried tuna used as a final topping or flavour enhancer. We learned that there are many grades of the stuff, differentiated by quality of fish, size of shaving and age.

Several shops offered a wider range of dried fish, from whole octopus dehydrated almost flat and preserved in vacuum pack to pinkie-nail-sized whole fish dried, salted, flavoured and sold in bags as snack food.

There were shops for green tea, spices, seaweed (the variety is staggering), dried fruits, sweets and pickled vegetables. There are also a couple of excellent knife stores, though the majority of kitchen and table ware is better sought out on Kappabashi Street.

Whether you're on a tour or on your own, if you want to enjoy Tsukiji, get here before 9am to avoid the worst of the crowds, and come hungry. The market is thick with street food stalls. The expected takoyaki (fried balls of octopus and dough) and  okonomiyake (savoury filled pancakes) are abundant. We saw several shops selling wide varieties of Japanese omelette (I didn't even know they came in flavours). Healthier visitors can opt for beautiful skewers of strawberries or melon, though most people seemed to be taking their fruit in the form of ice cream. It was a relief to see so many options beyond the ubiquitous green tea. Flaming grills offer up octopus on a stick, chicken teriyaki or Kobe beef.

The last, though still expensive, is half the price of a restaurant portion and comes sliced thinly and packaged; you buy it and then give it to the lady to cook for you, over high heat and quickly so that the flames render the fat, leaving almost-buttery meat behind.

We deeply regretted having breakfast. We should have skipped it and come here hungry. But had we snacked too much at the market we would have made even less of a dent into our enormous sushi lunch.

Getting out of Tsukiji as it reaches peak crowd to go to a posh restaurant in Ginza was a good move. Tourists and locals alike pack the streets by lunch time, making moving around quite challenging. Cookly's class is in a sushi specialist in the basement of a building on Chuo Dori, the main street in the posh shopping district of Ginza, a short taxi ride away. With its subtle signage out front and humble entrance, I suspect it's not a place tourists often find their way into without pre-arrangement. Certainly the other diners in the rest of the restaurant looked Japanese and were observing the traditions of removing their shoes at the entry and sitting at floor level. We were in a lovely private room with loads of Japanese atmosphere but the comfort of western chairs.

At this point our group of five met up with several other tours ... primarily of Americans and Brits in Japan for the Rugby World Cup ... who'd been elsewhere with their own guides. We all donned sushi chef jackets and got down to business.

My only two quibbles: this is more a sushi "assembly" than a sushi "making" class, you don't get much on how to select and cut the fish or how to make the rice, which is the really tricky stuff, and; each guide translates for his or her own group. While I admire the dedication to customer service, multiple English translations made for quite a distracting babble. Still, it was great fun as a respected sushi chef came in, demonstrated his filleting skills, then stepped us through the process for both rolls and traditional strips of raw fish over tightly-packed ovals of rice. Success at home a few weeks later confirmed that we'd mastered the basics.

The result of your work is a generous sushi feast, which gets even better as the members of different groups start talking to each other and exchanging stories of their travels. On one side of us was the family of one of the American rugby players, having a magnificent time even though their team was sure to go out of the tournament by that point, and a couple of English lads who'd misjudged their timings on Fuji the day before and had to cover more than 20 miles at speed so they wouldn't get left on the mountain. They were limping like old men, but had a story for life.

I suspect such conviviality develops naturally in most classes, but the common link of rugby greased the conversational skids. I'll talk soon about the magic that travelling under the umbrella of a global sporting event brings. But first ... I really need to tell you about the bizarre and wonderful way the Japanese do Disney.