Nanamachi Morning Market

Four hundred years of the same arrangement: farmers bring what they have grown into Ono, sit down on the street, and lay it out on the ground. Not on tables — on mats and boxes on the pavement, which is now rare enough in Japan to be remarkable in itself. The market runs every morning from the spring equinox to New Year's Eve, from about seven until eleven.

It is small. Two to five sellers on a weekday, ten to fifteen at a weekend, weather depending. The sellers are mostly elderly women from the surrounding villages and the conversation is in Ono dialect, largely about how to cook what is being sold. On Sundays several blocks of the street are closed to traffic. It is the opposite of a tourist market and it is the reason to be in Ono in the morning rather than just climbing to the castle.