The shopping street runs along a ridge. Karahori's arcade extends east to west on the spine of the Uemachi plateau, and the slopes fall away to the north and south from it on both sides. Walking the street itself is entirely flat; turn once and you are going downhill within a few paces, steeply enough to change your gait. Along those slopes stand converted nagaya row houses, narrow at the front and deep behind, so that stepping inside one gives you considerably more room than the frontage led you to expect. The reason any of this survives is that these particular blocks escaped the wartime fires that took most of the surrounding city.

Two subway lines are close by and the city centre is minutes away, which is why the rents did not stay low forever. There are enough gradients that an electric bicycle is not an indulgence here but the sensible choice for anyone doing this daily. The lanes are too narrow for cars, which is why the houses are still standing.

A flat street and a steep one meeting at right angles is not a common arrangement in a Japanese city of this size or this age. The row houses were built cheaply and quickly for people who worked nearby, which is why so many of them share walls and why so few have been demolished individually. Conversion work here has to accept the existing frame rather than replace it, so the shops tend to be shaped by decisions made a hundred years ago. You can usually see the original beams from wherever you are sitting. Here the topography has determined not only how you walk but where the shops were able to be at all, which is a rarer thing to be able to see from the pavement.