Two trades share one long street. Den Den Town runs along Sakaisuji in Nipponbashi: shops for electronic components, appliances and computer parts on one hand, and shops devoted to animation, models and figures on the other, occupying the same few blocks with very little overlap in customers. The district was known for electricals first, and the rest arrived afterwards and stayed, and the older signage is still legible above some of the newer frontages. Come for one and the other becomes scenery you walk through without registering it at all. Stand back, though, and watch how people behave in front of either kind of shelf, and the posture turns out to be identical in both cases. The more specific the thing being hunted, the further into the shop the hunter goes, and the shelving is arranged for finding rather than for display, with the good material at the back where the light is worst.

Ebisuchō and Nipponbashi stations both serve it, shops and apartments share the blocks, and rents are moderate for central Osaka. It goes quiet early; the shutters come down while the street is still busy with people walking through it toward somewhere else. There is no evening scene here to speak of and nobody involved seems to want one.

What you are actually watching is two entirely separate searches happening in the same place, neither of which notices the other or feels any need to. The street runs for about a kilometre and the character of it shifts as you go south. Component shops thin out; model shops thicken. Nobody planned the gradient. That is the ordinary condition of the street, and it has been for a long time.