The shopfronts have been returned to how they looked in the Shōwa years. The Shōwa no Machi district in Bungotakada is a stretch of shopping street where the businesses have restored their frontages to that period and continue trading from them. There is a sweet shop, a museum, and cars of the era on display, and the approach was applied along the whole street rather than to individual buildings.

Restoring, here, did not mean building something new in an old manner. It meant removing the signage and cladding that had been added later and exposing what was underneath — which is only possible if what was underneath is still there. That is the part that depended on luck rather than intention: when the shopping street declined, the buildings were not replaced, because there was no money to replace them, and that neglect preserved the material this project later needed. Nakatsu is about thirty minutes away by car, the town has its own hospitals and shops, and housing here is inexpensive by any comparison you care to make.

Making something look old and uncovering something that is old are entirely different pieces of work. The first can be commissioned; the second can only be done where the fabric survives, and no amount of budget will produce it otherwise. This street exists because there was something left to uncover. The decades of decline that everyone in the town regretted are the direct reason the buildings were never demolished, which is an uncomfortable sequence to set out but the true one, and worth saying plainly.