The shop floors stay level all the way up the steps. Sannenzaka is the stepped and sloping approach to Kiyomizu-dera, lined with townhouses carrying mushiko-mado, the plastered lattice windows of the upper storey, nearly all of them now trading as shops. Building along a slope means that keeping a floor horizontal requires a different foundation height for every house, so the plinths of neighbouring buildings sit at slightly different levels the whole way along.

The district was designated an Important Preservation District in September 1976. Turn off partway up and the lanes lead toward the Yasaka pagoda in one direction and Kōdai-ji in another, which is how most people end up walking further than they intended. This is temple-gate ground: the volume of people passing through is high, housing is limited, and the use of the street has settled almost entirely on trade. Shops on an approach like this serve two flows, those going up and those coming down, and it is said locally that the two buy different things.

A stepped street cannot take a cart. That single constraint produced the pattern of small frontages you see now, because no one could assemble a large sales floor where goods had to be carried in by hand, and the constraint outlived the carts by a century. What is left is a row of narrow shops on a slope, which turns out to suit the conditions exactly. Where the gradient slows everyone down, small premises do better than large ones, because the customer is already walking at the speed of looking rather than at the speed of getting somewhere.