The Nanukamaichi morning market has been running every Sunday for more than two hundred years, which means it has continued through the Boshin War that devastated this city in 1868, through the Showa-era conflicts, through the 2011 earthquake. Markets that persist this long do so because communities need them, and the need persists through whatever disrupts everything else. The Nanukamaichi district itself is unusual: a commercial street where Taisho and early Showa-era architecture has survived in sufficient quantity to give the neighborhood a coherent period character. The wooden shopfronts and advertising signage from the early twentieth century are not a reconstruction; they are what was not demolished. Walking the street before the market begins is a way of seeing a Japanese commercial district in something like its original form. The market itself is what morning markets are when they are not designed for visitors: produce, pickles, and local food from people who grow or make them, sold to people who live nearby and come every Sunday. Visitors are welcome. The experience of shopping for breakfast ingredients in this context — the continuity of the building, the continuity of the market — is not easily replicated.