The stalls are arranged to form a lane. Kita no Yatai is a cluster of small food stalls in central Obihiro, set out so that walking between them feels like walking down an alley rather than through a food court, and what they serve comes from Tokachi, the farmland surrounding the city. Its distinguishing feature is not the food but the tenancy: operators rotate by design, so places pass to people starting out rather than staying with the same holders indefinitely until they retire. Come back after a few years and the faces have changed completely, and so has half the menu. Very few entertainment districts anywhere have decided in advance how a vacancy is going to be filled, and fewer still have written it down. The stalls are small enough that you will hear every word of the conversation beside you whether you want to or not.

Obihiro station is within walking distance, and there is work in agriculture and food processing throughout the year rather than seasonally. Getting around day to day still requires a car, and the cold here is not the cold of Honshū and should not be packed for as though it were.

What is worth seeing is the arrangement as much as the eating — a district that has deliberately kept a door open for whoever comes next, at some cost to the people already inside. Tokachi produces dairy, beans, potatoes and wheat in quantity, and the stalls draw on all of it without making a programme of the fact. Winter here is long and the lane is heated in the way small buildings are. It runs year-round regardless. Very little else about it announces itself, which is probably the point of the whole thing.