Worship and eating happen on the same street here. Oharaimachi runs from the approach to the Inner Shrine, a stone-paved lane lined with gabled townhouses turned end-on to the road, with the narrower lanes of Okage Yokochō branching off partway along its length. Visitors go up to the shrine first and eat on the way back down, which gives the street a direction, and you can feel that direction in the way the crowd moves around you even when it is not especially busy. Come early instead, when shopkeepers are wetting the stones outside their doors and the lane smells of wood and water rather than of food. Walk it as a road you take on the way home and the low frontages start to make sense; they were never meant to stop anybody on the way up.

The trade here runs all year because the pilgrims do, so the seasonal swing is milder than in most temple towns and the shops are correspondingly less anxious about it. Ise proper is fifteen minutes away by car and handles the ordinary business of living. There are no bargains here, and none are pretended, and the prices are the same in February as in August.

What becomes clear on the walk is that a gate town is not a place you visit alongside a shrine; it is a place the shrine caused to exist, and everything about its proportions follows from that. The buildings were rebuilt in traditional form within living memory, which is either a reconstruction or a continuation depending on how you count. The shrine itself is rebuilt every twenty years, so the town has never treated newness as a problem. That attitude is older than the street. The distinction is visible in the width of the road itself, which was never sized for shopping and still is not.