Sakura-ebi or raw shirasu from Suruga Bay
Sakura-ebi or raw shirasu from Suruga BayPhoto: AyaKatase / CC BY 4.0
The small pink shrimp of Suruga Bay is fished at night in spring and autumn. Shizuoka also lands the second-largest shirasu catch in Japan. Nabura sells Suruga Bay fish, but neither is promised on a given day; ask at the counter, and take the bonito if they are gone.
- Short enough to be certain of: 1 hr 30 min door to door, so even a tender day works.
- It is not only a photo stop: japan's deepest bay, its pink shrimp, its whitebait and the eels next door.
- No single published ride covers this one. Budget for a taxi both ways, or fold it into a guided day.
Why Sakura-ebi or raw shirasu from Suruga Bay is famous
Japan's deepest bay, its pink shrimp, its whitebait and the eels next door
Sakura-ebi is a shrimp of four or five centimetres, nearly transparent with red pigment, so a live one looks pink. Suruga Bay is its home water. The fishery there dates from 1894 and is worked by night trawling in spring and autumn, with summer closed for spawning. Shirasu is the whitebait of anchovy and sardine. Shizuoka's catch of it was the second largest in Japan in 2016, and the local preference is for it boiled.
The sea floor off this coast drops to 2,500 metres. That depth feeds a shrimp caught commercially nowhere else in Japan, and a fishery that shut itself down in 2018 to save it.
The Philippine Sea Plate pushes north; the floor drops to 2,500 m
Hattori Kurajirō's ponds; the birthplace of Japanese eel culture
Faster growth, less disease; the method spreads from Hamana
Autumn season cancelled, the first closure in the fishery's history
Bonito and shirasu are at the Nabura market beside the berth. Sakura-ebi lands at Yui and eel is in Hamamatsu, each about an hour's drive in opposite directions.
Three places, three different answers
The one the queue agrees on, the one people who live here use instead, and the one nearest your ship. Opening days change; check before you build a day around one.
Where the 1 hr 30 min goes
Counted from the moment you step off the gangway. The hour before all-aboard is not in this bar; it is already set aside.
5 minutes each way is the measured figure for nabura market, shuttle or taxi ~5 min, not the optimistic one. If your ship is late, cut the 1 hr 20 min in the middle. Never cut the hour at the end.
Routes that already include it
Each one is a finished day we have walked and timed, with this stop in it. Read the route rather than assembling it yourself.
What to put beside it
Each of these still lands you back aboard with the hour to spare.
2 hr 50 min for bothCape Park and the Marine Park shore
Two free, always-open stretches of the cape.
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3 hr for bothNabura Market seafood lunch
The fish hall and food hall beside the fishing port, named for the fishermen’s word for a school of bonito.
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3 hr 10 min for bothOmaezaki Lighthouse and the cape
A white brick tower designed under Richard Henry Brunton and first lit in 1874, one of Japan’s 16 climbable lighthouses.
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