The street is about three metres wide. Mochiidono Center Gai is a shopping street three minutes on foot from Kintetsu Nara station, and walking three hundred metres south from it brings you into Naramachi, where latticed townhouses survive in some number. Craft shops, shops selling bowls and plates, and cafés occupy those houses, so the two areas function as one route: covered arcade first, then open lanes, with no break in between where you have to decide to continue.

A block called Yume Cube opened in 2007 as a place where small businesses can test themselves in a very small unit, and long-established shops and new ones now stand along the same street. Off the main line, there are shops in converted old houses down the lanes, and because the signs are small you find them by walking rather than by looking them up. That is a slower way to shop and a considerably better one for the shops, since a customer who is scanning is a customer still in the street.

Three metres is close enough to hold a conversation with the shop opposite. From a customer's point of view it means both sides arrive in the eye at once, so you can walk from one end to the other and see the entire street without stopping once — which sounds like a criticism and is not. A wide street makes you choose a side and lose half of what is on offer, and the half you lose is the half you never learn about. This one has kept its traffic for decades on the strength of a single measurement, and the measurement is its width, which no amount of refurbishment could improve on.