Zaimokucho Yoichi

Every Saturday afternoon from early April to late November, four hundred metres of Zaimokucho — a shopping street in central Morioka — closes to traffic and fills with stalls. More than a hundred of them in a normal week: vegetables from the surrounding farms, seafood off the Sanriku coast, flowers, bread, local beer, cooked food eaten standing up.

It is a genuine market rather than a tourist event, run by the street's own shopkeepers with outside producers joining, and it has been going for decades. It runs from ten past three in the afternoon to half past six, which is an unusual window and means it is neither a morning market nor a night market but the hours when Morioka finishes work. Zaimokucho also has Miyazawa Kenji connections and a bronze of him on the street.