The black and white grid on the walls is made of roof tiles. Nakamachi in Matsumoto is a street of storehouses converted into shops, and the pattern is namako-kabe: flat tiles fixed to the wall with the joints between them raised in white plaster. It was adopted as fire protection. This is castle-town ground, about seven minutes on foot from Matsumoto Castle and on the line of the old Zenkōji highway, and storehouse construction from the Edo through the Taishō periods survives here in quantity.

Folk craft and studio craft shops, furniture, clothing, homeware, restaurants, small museums and galleries are mixed along the same frontages rather than sorted into zones, which is how the street reads as one place rather than as a shopping centre laid out flat. Nawate-dōri, running beside the river, is a separate street of very narrow shopfronts a short walk away. Nakamachi was named in the national selection of thirty shopping streets in the 2018 financial year. The station is within walking distance, and hospitals and schools are close, so before it is a street for visitors it is a street that a household can actually live off.

Namako-kabe is the answer given by a town that had burned down more than once. Using storehouses as shops has similarly practical roots: they are solid, they have height, and they take alteration well, which matters more to a tenant than how the wall looks from outside. The result is a streetscape people photograph for its pattern. That pattern is, among other things, a record of how many times this street caught fire.