Once a week the street turns into a market. Zaimokucho is a walkable street from Morioka station lined with ironware workshops and shops, and on Saturday evenings stalls appear along it for the yoichi. The name means timber town: merchants from Omi were moved here some four hundred years ago at the order of the Nanbu lord, when logs came down the river in rafts and were gathered and sold on this stretch. The timber trade is long gone. The name stayed, and so did the ironwork, which arrived later and never left.

In the workshops you can follow a kettle from the making of the mould to the finish, and what surprises most people is the ratio: the mould takes longer than the object, and then it is broken to get the object out. Nothing about the process is quick, and none of it is hidden; the workshops keep their doors open onto the street and let the noise out with the heat. The street also carries a second name, Ihatov Avenue, after the invented word of Miyazawa Kenji, who has associations up and down this part of the city. Morioka station is within walking distance, Tokyo is a little over two hours by Shinkansen, and the ordinary business of living is handled in the town centre, which is close enough that nobody treats this as a district apart.

A place named for work that has ended is an odd thing to keep saying aloud. The rafts are gone, the name is not, and the trade that actually continues is the one the name says nothing about. Four centuries in, nobody seems inclined to correct it, and on a Saturday evening, with the stalls out and the smell of grilling coming down the pavement, the street is far too busy to care.