One building brought the street back. In Nagahama's old quarter stands a bank faced in black plaster, and around it — over years, one shop at a time — have gathered glass studios, galleries and small independent retailers. Glass was not a traditional industry in this town, so this is not a production district in the way that phrase usually means; the craft was chosen rather than inherited, which is a different kind of history and worth being honest about. What it has produced, though, is a street where you can watch a piece being blown and then buy something two doors along, and that is not common in a town of this size anywhere in the country. It feels like watching a skill in the process of becoming local, some way in but visibly not finished. The older shopfronts and the newer ones have not been made to match, which helps.

Nagahama station is close, Kyoto is about fifty minutes away, and the town centre has a hospital and the ordinary shops that make a place liveable rather than merely visitable. Winters on the north shore of the lake are genuinely cold and should be taken seriously rather than romanticised.

The tourist version of this story says that old buildings drew people in and the town revived. The truer version is that somebody decided to use what happened to be left standing, and that the people followed afterwards, slowly. Get the order right and the whole street reads differently. The bank was due to be demolished and was bought instead by a company set up for the purpose. Everything after that followed from one decision. It is a small town and the decision was visible. Look for the black wall first, and work outward from there.