People live inside the arcade. Takamatsu's Marugamemachi was rebuilt around a domed plaza, and the redevelopment deliberately put specialist shops, a fresh food market and housing into the same structure rather than separating them by function as almost every other scheme does. In the evening you see somebody carrying groceries up to the floors above the shops, which sounds unremarkable until you realise how rarely it happens anywhere else. An arcade is normally a thing you pass through on the way somewhere; here a portion of the population does not pass through, and the pace of the street is measurably different because of it. The architecture is recent and makes no attempt to pretend otherwise, which is a relief.

Kotoden and JR stations are close, and this is the centre of Takamatsu rather than an annexe to it, which also makes it a sensible base for moving around Shikoku for a few days. Because there is a fresh market inside, you can do ordinary shopping here in the middle of a trip without hunting for a supermarket.

The question every provincial shopping street in Japan faces is how to keep the shutters up as the population thins. The answer given here was to move people in above them, which was expensive and slow and appears, twenty years on, to have worked. Whether that answer travels to other towns is genuinely arguable and is argued about. The street is around four hundred years old and the shopkeepers organised the rebuild themselves over a long period of negotiation. Land ownership was separated from land use to make it possible. That mechanism is the part other towns come to study. That it worked in this one is visible within an hour's walk.