Shipping offices, now full of small shops. The blocks from Sakaemachi through Ottsunaka-dōri retain buildings that housed shipping and trading companies before the war, and their rooms have been taken one at a time by homeware shops, studios and cafés. Because these were offices, the individual rooms are small and open off a corridor rather than onto the street, which changes everything about how the district can be used. That means a single building can hold a dozen tenants, and it means anyone opening something can start at a scale that would be impossible in a shopfront at street level. Climb to the third floor of a building without a lift and there are usually very few other customers, and after a while that quiet becomes the reason you go up rather than an incidental benefit of the climb.

The stairwells are original and the tiling in them is worth the detour on its own. Motomachi and Minato-Motomachi stations are close and Sannomiya is walkable in about fifteen minutes. Rents are at the higher end for Kobe, though the rooms are small enough that the totals stay manageable for a single person.

When the large companies left, a great many small trades moved in behind them and have stayed. The buildings survived the war and the 1995 earthquake, the second of which decided which parts of Kobe would be rebuilt and which would be repaired. Repair is why the interiors are still odd shapes. A district full of small rooms attracts a particular kind of business, and the same kind keeps arriving. As fates for an emptied office building go, this is one of the luckier ones, and it was not planned by anybody.