Buy downstairs, eat upstairs. Naha's Makishi Public Market puts fishmongers and pork butchers on the ground floor and dining rooms on the one above, and what you carry up the stairs is cooked and returned to you at a table. It is only a market and a set of kitchens divided by a single flight, and yet the arrangement visibly changes how people look at the counters below it. Even visitors start examining the fish with something like intent, because they are about to eat it and because they, rather than a chef, chose it. An ordinary thing — deciding for yourself what you will have — comes back to you after what turns out to have been a long absence. The pork counters are worth as much attention as the fish, and get considerably less. Around the building, covered arcades including Heiwa-dōri continue for some distance, so you can leave the market and stay under a roof for a while longer, which matters in the rain here.

This is central Naha and getting to it is not a problem at any hour. Prices, including rents, run higher than in mainland cities of comparable size, which surprises people who assume the opposite about an island. The building is considerably newer than its reputation suggests and nobody minds if you say so.

Okinawan pork is used entirely, which is visible at the counters in a way that surprises visitors from the mainland, and the fish are colours that no mainland market sells. The market was rebuilt recently and the traders moved back in. Prices are not low, and the reasons for that are all logistical. The whole design amounts to one flight of stairs between choosing a fish and eating it, and that shortness is the entire idea.