Eight people and it is full. Miroku Yokochō is a run of small wooden huts put up in a block of central Hachinohe, each holding about eight seats, arranged in facing rows with a narrow lane between them. Every time a door opens you hear the conversation from the hut opposite as though it were happening at your own elbow, and after a while you stop distinguishing between the two. The narrowness is not a limitation that was reluctantly accepted; it is the design, and a first-time customer can usually manage about ten minutes of drinking in silence before that becomes impossible to sustain. Hachinohe works in fishing and manufacturing, and what arrives on the counter carries the port in it without any ceremony being made of the fact. Nothing about the place is polished, and the huts show their age honestly rather than decoratively, which is increasingly rare in districts of this kind.

The Shinkansen station is reachable by bus and rail rather than on foot. The central district can be walked comfortably, though running an entire life here without a car would be difficult and most people do not try. Winter arrives properly and the huts are heated by whatever the operator has decided will do.

Eight seats per door is the only real rule in the lane, and every other custom in it follows from that single number. The lane was built in the early 2000s on land that was standing empty, which makes it younger than it looks and deliberately so. Squid and mackerel arrive from the port a few kilometres away. The operators change over time here as well, though less formally than in Obihiro. It is a remarkably efficient way to design a social space.