Japan/Honshu: Osaka – Kuromon Ichiba Market
When in Osaka and finished with viewing the stunning castle, you gotta head to the vast and iconic Kuromon Market, open since 1902. The covered marketplaces stretches for over 600m with around 150 shops purveying mostly fresh seafood and sushi, lots of shellfish, local fish and meat delicacies, Japanese candies, and so on and so forth. This is the place to try some of the best and freshest sushi and sashimi, and also venture into something unusual. Sea urchins, different crabs, giant oysters, whale meat and whale bacon, ultra fat tuna belly toro, eel, wagyu beef, caviar and roe from salmon to flying fish, octopus, abalone, squid, and elaborate sushi and sashimi sets. Many shops double as on-the-spot restaurants. We spent hours here! The market is locally known as “Osaka’s kitchen” because both locals and restaurant chefs get their supplies here.