The Omicho market sits in the middle of Kanazawa. The name is usually explained by saying merchants were brought here from the province of Omi and settled in this district, though other accounts exist.

What actually formed the market was a fire. In the third month of 1690 a large one burned through the city, and in its aftermath the fish market at the mouth of the Asano river, which had stood in Fukuromachi, moved to Omicho. In 1721 the fish market at the mouth of the Sai river was absorbed as well.

Everything was gathered into one place, piece by piece, over thirty years, and what resulted served as the kitchen of the Kaga domain and its castle town.

Around a hundred and eighty shops trade there now, dealing mostly in Kaga vegetables and in fish, and the market is used by people who live in the city quite as much as by visitors passing through. At the rice-bowl counters you choose from what came in that morning and have it laid over rice, and at the popular ones you queue. One building inside it, Omicho Ichiba-kan, holds seventy-three shops on its own. A market assembled out of the wreckage of a fire has been running for three centuries.