The ground floors of the wholesale buildings have become small shops. Kuramae was a wholesaling district, and what now occupies those ground floors are small businesses and workshops making leather goods, stationery and coffee. Because the buildings were designed for trade between businesses, they were never fitted out to attract passers-by, and the rents were correspondingly lower than a retail street in central Tokyo would command.

Makers moved into that gap, and the type of shop that resulted is one where the work is done at the front and sold from the same room. You can hear leather being cut and paper being trimmed from the pavement, which tells you what a place is before you have read the sign — an advantage that was never designed and could not easily be manufactured. The Ōedo and Asakusa lines are close by, central Tokyo is about ten minutes away, and rents here are high by shitamachi standards though still well under what the same frontage would cost further west.

Making and selling in the same room changes how stock has to be handled. You can produce against what has actually sold rather than manufacturing in quantity and storing the result, which removes the need for space to hold inventory and lets a business survive in a very small unit. That is the connection between what this district used to be and what it is now, and it is a matter of dimensions rather than of atmosphere. The reason Kuramae has filled up with small shops is that the proportions of a wholesale building happen to suit the way these makers need to work.