TOKYO — It’s going to be tough to replace 83 years’ worth of grime.

As the fishmongers of Tokyo’s famed wholesale seafood market, Tsukiji, opened for their final day at their familiar site on Saturday, they and their customers lamented the end of an era of grunge.

“Dirty is best,” said Yoshitaka Moria, 38, an owner of a fish shop in the Ota ward of Tokyo, who regularly shops for seafood at Tsukiji and was buying an assortment of tuna, sea bream, oysters and amberjack on Saturday morning. “It makes this place so vibrant. I know that the fishmongers are working too hard to clean up.”

In the waning hours of the market believed to be the world’s largest for seafood, the lumpy cobblestone alleys, sprawled across 57 acres, were soaked in bloodied water, and forbidden cigarette butts mingled with fragments of bone and guts.