Nothing in the sequence of shops makes any sense. Ōsu's arcade puts an electronics dealer beside a vintage clothing shop, an Asian grocer a few doors along, and a substantial temple in the middle of the covered street, and none of this has been rationalised in the way such districts usually are over time. Similar trades did not cluster together; they stayed mixed, for decades, and a small theatre for traditional performance sits inside the same jumble without seeming out of place to anybody. Because you cannot predict what the next shopfront will be, the walk never becomes tiring in the way a long arcade normally does about halfway along its length.

Two subway lines serve it. Shops and apartments share the same blocks, so rents are moderate for central Nagoya, and there are people here at hours when comparable arcades have long since emptied out and gone dark. Weekend afternoons are too crowded to stroll through with any dignity, and the crowd is unusually mixed in age. The temple is used rather than preserved, and the difference is visible in the number of people going in on an ordinary Tuesday. Secondhand clothing has been sold here long enough that the shops have their own hierarchy, which nobody will explain.

What Ōsu has is the accumulated value of never having been tidied up, which is not something a district can decide to acquire later on. The temple came first and the market grew around it, which is the usual order and is unusually visible here. Rents stayed low for decades. That is what let the strangeness accumulate. Very few places anywhere have managed to keep hold of it, and most that had it have spent it.