The glass is blown inside what used to be a warehouse. Along Sakaimachi and into Ironai stand stone warehouses and former banks put up between the Meiji and Showa eras, and a number of them now hold glassworks and the shops that sell what is made in them. Kitaichi Glass's third hall was built in 1891 as a transit warehouse for the herring fishery — a timber frame faced in stone — and was taken over in 1983 for use as a glass shop, and is now a shop and a cafe. One room is filled with oil lamps and kept dark, and sitting in it you lose track of the fact that the building was designed to store fish.

The canal is five minutes away on foot, and the street runs roughly midway between Otaru station and Minami-Otaru, about 1.3 kilometres of it now covered by an outdoor wireless network, which is the sort of detail that dates a place more precisely than any plaque. Sapporo is thirty-five minutes by rapid train. The town has its hospital and its shops, and the snow is cleared every winter at somebody's expense.

Port equipment becomes surplus when the port changes. Thick stone walls built to keep fish cold now shelter a trade that works with heat, which is a long way to travel in terms of purpose. The wall's job, though, has not altered at all: keep the temperature inside from moving, whichever direction it is being asked to hold. Walk the street in February and you can feel the argument being made by the buildings themselves, which are cold in a way that has nothing to do with the weather outside them, and warm in the two or three places where somebody is actually working.