Restaurants and offices moved into the units that had stood empty. The shopping street at Aburatsu has spent years bringing vacant premises back into use, and what occupies them now is a mixture of places to eat, working offices and multi-purpose space. Reviving a shopping street is usually discussed as a matter of attracting more shops. Here the approach included putting employers on the street, which returns people to it during working hours.

The two halves depend on each other. Daytime population is what makes a restaurant viable; the existence of somewhere to have lunch is what makes an office tenant consider the location — so neither can be done first and both have to be pursued at once. This is the town centre of Nichinan. New tenants continue to arrive, and the empty units have been filling in sequence rather than all at once. The multi-purpose spaces exist because leaving the use undefined makes a unit easier to let than specifying it in advance.

Empty shops on a shopping street are not merely a rent problem. Before a unit can be offered at all there are questions of whether the owner intends to let it, whether the family still lives on the floor above, whether the estate has been settled — and each of those has to be worked through one building at a time, with people who may not want to discuss it. That is the slow part of the work, and it never appears in the photographs of a revived shopping street. It is probably where the years at Aburatsu actually went, and it is the reason such projects cannot be copied simply by copying what the finished street looks like.