The market is held on days whose date contains a nought, a two, a five or a seven. The morning market at Gojōme is said to have around five hundred years behind it, and on those days the street fills with open stalls selling vegetables, wild mountain greens and seedlings. Because it opens only on fixed dates, both sellers and buyers carry the schedule in their heads, and some people come down from the hills specifically to be there.

What is on the trestles changes with the season — seedlings and sansai in spring, root vegetables and things to be preserved in autumn — so the contents of the market function as a calendar for anyone who reads them. Akita city is about fifty minutes away by car, which is close enough that the market has to be worth the trip rather than merely convenient. Along the same street, a number of businesses have opened in empty houses and in a former school building, which is a fairly recent development and one that depends on the market days for its traffic.

A periodic market is a mechanism that lets people sell without owning a shop. If what you grew can be put on the ground at the roadside for one morning, there is no premises to fit out and no rent to find, and the smallest producers can turn a crop into cash without any capital at all. That is not a small thing in a district of this kind. Five hundred years of continuity is probably owed less to tradition than to how low that threshold has stayed, and to the fact that nobody along the way found a reason to raise it. Markets end when they start charging.