The eaves come out over the road. In Nakamachi the merchant houses extend their roofs far toward the street, and the covered walkway this creates has a name of its own, komise. Between the posts is a passage that belongs, strictly speaking, to the houses on either side, yet it works as a public arcade: on a snowing day or a glaring one you can walk the length of the street without getting wet or burnt. The arrangement has outlasted several generations of owners, and the district was designated a preservation area in 2005. Snow is the reason it exists, and snow is what it is still measured against.

What is striking is how ordinary it feels from inside. The floor is not level in the way a modern arcade is level, the posts interrupt the line of sight, and shopkeepers set things out under their own stretch of it as if it were a veranda, which in a sense it is. Nobody appears to have agreed on a single width. Hirosaki is about thirty minutes away by car; this is a town of some thirty thousand people, and the snow in winter is deep enough to make the shape of a building a practical question rather than a decorative one.

In snow country, a building's form is decided by where the snow is meant to go. The komise was not built to be looked at. It was built so that trade could continue through the winter, which is a different intention altogether, and the fact that it ended up deciding how the whole street looks is the sort of accident worth arriving early for. Stand under it at eight in the morning, before the shops are open, and the order of those two things is obvious.