This was a port for leaving the country by ship. Around the harbour at Mojikō stand the station building, the customs house and a number of trading company offices, put up between the Meiji period and the early Shōwa years and surviving as a group rather than as isolated survivors. The former Dairen Route Shed, completed in 1929, is an Art Deco passenger terminal: people boarding for Taiwan or for Dairen passed through it on their way out.

Before any of that this was a fishing and salt-making village, and it became a trading port only in the modern period, which is fast even by the standards of Japanese port cities. The Dairen Friendship Memorial Hall was built to mark fifteen years of the sister-city relationship between Kitakyūshū and Dalian, and it is a recent addition to the row along the water. Mojikō station is immediately at hand, Kokura is about fifteen minutes away, and the district is now a mixture of housing and shops rather than offices alone.

Harbour buildings are built to face the people arriving from outside. They were designed as the first thing a passenger would see on stepping off a ship, so their fronts address the water — which means anyone approaching from the town side comes round to the back first and meets these buildings in reverse. Walk from the station and you get one version of the district; go out along the quay first and turn back toward the town, and you get the version the architects were drawing. Changing the order in which you walk it changes what the architecture is understood to be doing.