The wholesale buildings are being used two ways at once. Chōjamachi sits between Sakae and Fushimi, a grid of textile wholesalers whose upper floors have gradually taken in art events and small restaurants alongside the fabric trade that is still very much there. The wholesale business is not conducted at street level, so on an ordinary afternoon the district reads as a quiet office quarter with unusually solid buildings and very little apparently happening in them. Then the loading hours come and the actual work of the place moves to the front, hand trucks and flattened boxes out on the pavement, a van reversing into a gap that is exactly the width of a van. Rolls of cloth go out past a gallery opening, and neither party appears to find this remarkable or worth mentioning.

Offices and apartments share the blocks, which means evenings and weekends empty out quickly, and anyone arriving in search of liveliness will be disappointed within about ten minutes. There is very little in the way of shopfront charm to soften the impression, and the buildings are frank about their age.

What made the newer tenants possible was the wholesalers staying: the cheap upper floors exist precisely because the ground floors never left, and the rents were low because nobody else wanted the space. That order matters, and it is almost always told the other way round, as though art arrived and rescued something that was failing. The district is not failing; it is simply doing its work out of sight. Come on a weekday, when the trade is visible and the story tells itself correctly.