Buy fish or meat from a stall on the ground floor, carry it upstairs, and one of the restaurants on the second floor will cook it and bring it to your table. The system has a name, mochiage, which means carrying it up. You pay the stall for the ingredient and the restaurant for the cooking, and the second figure depends on what you ask them to do with it.

It began in 1990, in the old market building. A woman named Chocho Setsutei, originally from Taiwan, was asked by a customer whether there was a good way to eat what they had just bought. She remembered how markets work in Taiwan, where choosing your own raw material and then having somebody cook it on the spot is simply the normal service, and she set the same thing up here.

What is laid out on the ground floor does not look like fish from anywhere else in Japan. Blues, reds, greens, patterned as though they belong on a coral reef, which is of course exactly where they have come from.

The first Makishi public market has been Naha's kitchen since 1950. The distance between where a fish is bought and where it is eaten is one flight of stairs, and somehow nobody anywhere else has arranged things this way.