A harbour where ships wait acquires places to spend the waiting. Mitarai was a port where vessels stopped for the tide, and along the waterfront there are still ships' inns, teahouses and a stone lantern. A ship waiting for wind or water might be held for days, so what the port sold was not primarily supplies but occupation — somewhere for the crew and passengers to put the time while the sea decided when they could leave.

Facing the street are a Shōwa-era theatre and Western-style buildings, which shows that the entertainment side of the port was rebuilt periodically rather than left as it was. Mitarai was designated an Important Preservation District in July 1994, and the island is now connected to the mainland by the Tobishima Kaidō bridges. Kure's centre is about an hour and a half away by car, and the working life of the island now consists largely of citrus growing, which is what it did between the ships and which it went back to afterwards.

The prosperity of a port is set by how fast ships are. As vessels became faster and waiting stopped being necessary, the businesses built on the waiting were the first to go — so the decline of a port town begins at its edges rather than at its centre, in the trades that were never really about shipping at all. The theatre and the teahouses closed first, and they closed before anybody had decided that the port was finished. The orange groves are still being worked, which is the order in which these things usually happen: the entertainment goes, then the shipping, and the agriculture outlasts both.