What stays with you about Motomachi is the angle. The district lies on a slope that falls toward the harbour, and the stone-paved streets climbing it are named one by one, so that people here give directions by naming a hill rather than a block. Churches, former consulates and houses that mix Japanese and Western construction stand along them, and the area was designated a preservation district in 1989. What the designation does not tell you is that a good many of the buildings are still lived in and worked in; shutters go up in the morning because somebody is opening a shop, not because a museum has started its day.

Walk down any of the hills and the harbour widens as you go, so the view depends entirely on which one you take, and you end up covering the same small area several times over without feeling that you have repeated yourself. The tram and the buses run along the flat, and a hospital and shops are within walking distance of most addresses. Living on the upper slopes is a different proposition from visiting them: snow has to be cleared from a gradient, and every errand ends with a climb. In February the handrails matter more than the views do.

A house with a view is a house with a long way home. The hills were cut to move cargo up from the water, and now they are walked for the sake of the view, which reverses the order in which they were made. You notice it in the windows of the Western-style houses, which almost all face the sea, and in the way people stop at the top of a slope without having intended to stop at all.