The building on the corner at the entrance was a bank. The Atami Ginza shopping street runs downhill toward the sea, with confectioners, coffee shops and small retailers along both sides. At the crossing where it begins stands a building that served as a bank until 1975 and is now occupied by the chamber of commerce — the kind of reuse that tells you fairly precisely when this district's first economy came to an end.

Dried fish sellers and coffee shops still fitted out exactly as they were in the Shōwa years continue to trade here, while other buildings have been refurbished and taken over by newer cafés and guesthouses, so the street is somewhere in the middle of a turnover rather than at either end of one. JR Atami station is about twenty minutes away on foot, which is far enough that the street has to be a destination rather than something passed through. Because the street lies on a slope, walking down it and walking back up are quite different experiences, and most visitors underestimate the second.

A shopping street in a hot spring town tips over each time its customers change generation. Premises fitted out for the previous set of visitors stop suiting the next set, and a district that cannot adapt simply empties — so the repair that works is to keep the buildings and replace what happens inside them. That is what is going on here at the moment. Old buildings with new businesses inside them are not a style anybody chose; they are what a district looks like partway through an exchange, and the exchange is not finished.