You can walk this street for a long time without intending to buy anything. Kappabashi runs some eight hundred metres of shops selling nothing but cooking equipment, tableware, confectionery tools and the plastic food models that Japanese restaurants put in their windows, and although it exists for the trade, the shelves are open to anyone and the prices do not change for you. A shop that sells pots sells only pots; the steamer shop stacks steamers to the ceiling; and going along one door at a time, you begin to understand how many separate small decisions a professional kitchen is actually made of. The specificity is the pleasure, and it takes about twenty minutes to start feeling it properly. Somewhere along the way you will pick up a ladle you have no use for and put it down again with real regret.

Ginza and Hibiya subway lines are close, the blocks mix shops with apartments, and rents here are not low, though the premises themselves are mostly small and old. Many of the shops shut early, so an unhurried arrival in the afternoon means walking past shutters and wondering what was behind them. Come in the morning instead, while the deliveries are still going in and the doors are propped open with a box.

Nothing is displayed in order to seduce you; the arrangement assumes you already know what a given object is for, and if you do not, nobody will explain it unless you ask. What you take away is rarely the thing you bought. It is the sight of an entire trade laid out in objects, almost none of which you need, and all of which somebody does.