The quay becomes a market at first light. On Sunday mornings the Tatehana wharf in Hachinohe fills with something like three hundred stalls along roughly eight hundred metres of concrete, opening around four and winding down by half past eight. Fish and vegetables and prepared food sit beside stands where you eat standing up, so that the distinction between shopping and breakfast dissolves within the first hundred metres. The market is run by a cooperative, the Minato Sunday Morning Market Association, which was established in March 2010. Before that it had been assembling here in one form or another for years, without the paperwork.

Arriving in the dark is part of it. The stalls are lit one by one, the sea is invisible off to one side, and the crowd at five in the morning divides fairly evenly between people who have not been to bed and people who got up specially. Nobody hurries, and yet the whole thing is over by the time an ordinary Sunday would begin. Hachinohe works in fishing and manufacturing, and the Shinkansen station is a bus ride away, which makes this a market people reach without a car more often than you would expect on a working wharf.

Get up early and the day is twice as long. A quay is built for loading and unloading, not for holding a market, and for six days out of seven that is exactly what this one does. The arrangement rests on an agreement that the use of the space changes once a week, and on several thousand people being willing to be there before the sun is. By nine the concrete is empty again, swept, and back to being a place where cargo is moved.