You are learning market stories: you will read the scene it happens in, learn 10 words and phrases, take apart the pattern behind them (telling stories and sharing what you've heard), hear them in a conversation, rehearse them, and finish by saying one thing out loud to be graded.
Exploring Toyosu Market (豊洲市場) and the Tsukiji Outer Market (築地場外市場) — where Tokyo's food story begins at 3am with the tuna auction and continues through the morning's street-side sushi and tamagoyaki.
The alarm rings at 2:30am. The stranger takes a taxi to Toyosu. 「マグロのセリは三時に始まるそうです。」 The new market is clean, modern, efficient — a glass-walled gallery where visitors watch the auction from above.
Below, rows of frozen bluefin tuna lie on the concrete floor like silver torpedoes. The auctioneer's bell rings. Hands fly. Numbers are shouted in a dialect only market men understand. In four minutes, a 200-kilogram tuna sells for twenty million yen.
By 7am, the stranger is at Tsukiji's outer market — the old neighborhood that refused to move. 「築地場外市場はまだ営業しているんだって。」 The narrow alleys are alive: vendors grilling scallops on sticks, tamagoyaki shops flipping golden omelets, grandmothers selling pickles from wooden barrels.
He buys a tamagoyaki on a stick. Sweet, warm, impossibly fluffy. 「築地の玉子焼きは有名らしいです。」 Now he understands why.