Why you should experience Sushizanmai Main Store in Tokyo, Japan.
Sushizanmai Main Store is an exuberant sushi institution where Tsukiji's seafood heritage, merchant culture, round-the-clock appetite and postwar commercial resilience converge around Kiyoshi Kimura's devotion to bluefin tuna.
Set along Shin-Ohashi-dori near Harumi-dori and just steps from Tsukiji Outer Market, Sushizanmai Main Store belongs to a district where fishmongers, knife merchants and specialist food shops preserve the commercial intensity built around Tokyo's former wholesale market. The restaurant extends that rhythm through the night, keeping sushi chefs behind the counter long after neighboring stalls have finished their morning trade. A broad menu makes the room accessible, but bluefin gives the restaurant its unmistakable center of gravity. The result is a sushi restaurant where Tsukiji's working relationship with seafood continues through a business conceived specifically to keep people eating in the district at any hour.
What you should know about Sushizanmai Main Store.
Sushizanmai Main Store is best known for Kiyoshi Kimura opening the first Sushizanmai in April 2001 as Japan's first sushi restaurant operating 24 hours a day throughout the year, building it from a comeback that began with his 33-square-meter Kiyozushi shop in Tsukiji in 1997. Kimura had entered the seafood trade after leaving the Japan Air Self-Defense Force in 1974, launched his own business in 1979 and later lost 80 businesses during Japan's economic collapse. Tsukiji landowner Fukuyo Ogawa subsequently offered Kimura a prime site after annual traffic to the district had fallen from more than six million people to 1.5 million, while Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank provided financial backing for the project. The new restaurant generated ¥54 million during its first month, ¥64 million during its second and ¥88 million during its third, establishing the flagship that remains at the center of the Sushizanmai group.
Kimura engineered the original 24-hour operation around six seafood deliveries each day, drawing from Tsukiji in the morning, Japanese ports through Haneda Airport later in the day and international catches through Narita Airport at night. Ingredients were divided into four-hour cycles and replaced as new deliveries arrived, turning continuous service into a seafood-sourcing problem Kimura's earlier career had prepared him to solve. Bluefin became the company's signature, reinforced by Kimura's New Year tuna purchases and a childhood memory of his mother dividing two pieces of tuna sashimi among herself and three children. The current flagship carries that fixation into akami, chutoro, otoro, seared preparations and sashimi, with Kimura selecting bluefin from waters around the world and more than 150 items extending the meal beyond tuna.
How to fold Sushizanmai Main Store into your trip.
Sushizanmai Main Store works as the meal anchor for a Tsukiji route connecting Buddhist architecture, the district's working food culture and the shrine that guarded its reclaimed shoreline centuries before the first tuna auction.
Begin at Tsukiji Hongwanji, rebuilt on reclaimed land in 1679 after the 1657 Great Fire of Meireki and reconstructed again in 1934 by architect Chuta Ito, whose reinforced-concrete hall combines Indian, Japanese and Western architectural sources and received Important Cultural Property status in 2014. Continue through Tsukiji Outer Market, whose roots follow the destruction of Nihonbashi Fish Market in the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and the opening of Tsukiji's wholesale market in 1935, with 460 shops still carrying seafood, produce, knives and prepared foods after wholesale operations moved to Toyosu in 2018. Conclude at Namiyoke Inari Shrine, founded in 1659 during the reclamation that created Tsukiji and later adopted by fish traders as the market's guardian, preserving the district's maritime origins beside memorials contributed by food-industry groups. Chuta Ito's rebuilt temple, the market created after the 1923 disaster and Namiyoke Inari Shrine's connection with reclaimed Edo shoreline place Sushizanmai Main Store inside more than three centuries of Tsukiji history centered on land, commerce and food.
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