Pass through one of the gates and the width of the street changes. Yokohama's Chinatown is bounded by gates at its four approaches and divided by lanes narrow enough to alter how you walk, and among the restaurants sit grocers selling dried goods and seasonings, tea merchants, and shops of ordinary household things. Visitors who have come to eat stay on the wider streets, which is reasonable enough, since that is where the eating is. Turn once into a side lane, though, and you find shelves that smell of dried seafood and a shop selling the sort of large pot a family actually cooks in, and this feels closer to the spine of the place than the restaurant frontages do. The people carrying bags know exactly what they came for and are not looking at anything else on the way. Prices in those shops assume a household rather than a holiday, and so do the quantities.

Minatomirai and Negishi lines are both close, and the residential streets lie off toward Ishikawachō and Motomachi, so the population turns over completely between afternoon and evening. On a public holiday it is genuinely crowded, and that is not the version by which to judge it or to form a first impression.

The gates are not decoration; they mark where the paving and the sightlines change. The district is known as somewhere to eat, which is true and incomplete in the way such reputations usually are. It is also somewhere to shop, quite seriously and with better results. Save that discovery for the second visit, when the restaurants have stopped being the point.