On a weekday, Karato is a wholesale floor: fugu and fish moving hand to hand among people who do this for a living and have no particular interest in being watched. Then Friday comes, and on the same counters the brokers begin slicing sushi and passing it straight to whoever is standing in front of them. The event has a name, Ikiiki Bakangai, and no fixed hour; it opens when the boats have delivered and ends when the fish runs out, which is a more honest way to run a market than most. Doors open at eight on Friday and Saturday, an hour earlier on Sundays and holidays, and everything closes at three, so arriving in a leisurely frame of mind means arriving to very little. There is no seating to speak of, and the arrangement does not apologise for this; people eat standing at the edges of the hall or take their boxes outside to the concrete by the water.

Carry your box outside and the Kanmon Strait is right there, Kitakyushu on the far bank, twenty minutes away through the tunnel that runs beneath it. Container ships pass close enough that you stop eating to watch them. Eating over the water, you understand that the prefectural border is only a line someone has drawn across it, and that the fish were never consulted about where it went.

The market looks as though it exists for visitors, and on a Sunday afternoon it very nearly does. First thing in the morning, though, it still belongs to the trade, and that order has not been reversed. Come early, eat standing up, and let the rest of the day arrange itself afterwards.