A hundred shops, each about the size of a large table. Harmonica Yokochō occupies a block immediately outside the north exit of Kichijōji station: roughly a hundred units of around three square metres, packed either side of passages barely wide enough for two people to pass each other. In the daytime the delicatessens and dried goods sellers are open and doing ordinary trade with people who live nearby. By early evening the same block has become somewhere to drink, and the shift is complete enough that it reads as a different neighbourhood altogether rather than the same one after dark. When one person stops walking, the flow behind them stops as well, immediately and without complaint from anybody. Nothing here has ever been widened or rationalised, and there is no sign that anyone seriously tried.

The Chūō and Inokashira lines both serve the station, there is a large park and full retail nearby, and it is an easy place to live with rents that reflect all of that quite accurately. The buildings are postwar and were never meant to last this long.

Dividing the ground so that a business could survive on three square metres is what produced this density, and it has held for decades without needing revision or subsidy. Narrowness is not a constraint in this block. The name comes from the way the stalls sit side by side like the reeds of a harmonica, which is the sort of description that turns out to be exact rather than poetic. Several of the food shops have been there since the postwar market days. The newer bars have not changed the width of anything. It is the reason there is anything here at all, and the reason it has not been replaced by something larger.