The copper on the front was surrendered once and put back later. Nakamachi-dōri in Ishioka carries a run of kanban-kenchiku — buildings with a decorated front elevation applied to a timber structure — put up after the great fire of 1929. The Hisamatsu shop, built around 1930, is a two-storey wooden example of the type, and it has traded in cosmetics and household goods ever since.

The copper sheeting on its facade was requisitioned during the war, and the building went without it for decades before the sheeting was replaced in recent years. Because this form was adopted widely during the reconstruction, several buildings along the street date from the same short period and were built to the same reasoning, which is why the frontages agree with each other in a way that accumulated streets never do. The Jōban line makes commuting to Tsuchiura or Mito straightforward, and the shops needed for daily life are gathered near the station, so the old street is not carrying the town's shopping on its own.

Architecture built after a disaster survives as a record of one particular year. Everything went up at once, so the style is uniform; then the copper was given up during the war, and now it is being restored — and all three of those events are shared by the whole street rather than by one owner. That is the unusual thing about this street, and it is easy to walk past. What you are reading is not the repair history of one building but the repair history of a whole town, laid out along a hundred metres of frontage and in the correct order.