There are almost no price tags. The wholesale district around Nihonbashi Yokoyamachō and Bakurochō deals in clothing and accessories for cash, and its customers are shops rather than shoppers. A block here means several buildings, and each building means a dozen small trading floors stacked one above another, one firm to a room, the firm's name printed on a sheet of paper by the door. Prices are quoted by the carton. The entire street is built on the assumption that nobody wants only one of anything.

Mornings start early and the afternoons go quiet, because buyers who came in from other prefectures leave on the early trains home; the clock of the district is set by somebody else's timetable. The Sōbu line and the subway run underneath, and in some of the wholesale buildings the upper floors are flats, so that work and home are stacked in the same stairwell. Cafés and small galleries have begun taking the units nobody needs for stock any more, and coffee served under a wholesaler's sign is no longer a strange sight along these streets.

A wholesale district can be honest about its appearance in a way retail streets cannot afford to be. Nothing has been spent on frontage, because the person walking in already knows what they came for. What is left is cardboard, hand trucks and shelves without prices, and that plainness is now the reason a certain kind of visitor walks through on a weekday morning. The district did not court them. It simply never got around to redecorating, and the absence of effort turned out to be the thing worth looking at.