One street behind the arcade, there are storehouses. Endōji is a covered shopping street dating from the Meiji period, and in recent years younger proprietors have been taking the units that had been standing empty. Directly behind it runs Shikemichi, where earthen storehouses stand and small roof shrines — yanegami — still sit above the eaves where they were put to guard against fire. The arcade keeps being updated because it is still doing the work of a shopping street; the back lane has not been updated because nothing ever required it to be. Walking between the two, you get the distinct sense of a single neighbourhood running at two different speeds simultaneously. The distance between them is a matter of a few dozen metres and about a century.

Nagoya station is within walking distance, the subway is close, and the blocks mix housing with retail, so this is a convenient place to live rather than only to visit. Shikemichi was widened deliberately after a fire, which is why it is called what it is called.

The new shops in the arcade were able to arrive because the older frame was still standing and still cheap enough to take a risk on. The two streets look like alternatives to one another, one restored and one not. The roof shrines were put up by individual households and each one belongs to a specific building rather than to the street. Shikemichi's storehouses have thick earth walls precisely because fire moved so easily through the rest of the city. Both streets survived the war because the wind went elsewhere. They are in fact consecutive, and the order in which they happened is the whole story.