Everything good is on the second floor: reading a Japanese stairwell sign

Street level in a Japanese city is mostly rent. The convenience store, the drugstore with its speaker loop, the chain izakaya with a photo menu in four languages — those pay for the frontage. What you came for is often three metres above your head, behind a window you have already walked past twice.

The building with too many names

Look for a narrow building of five or six floors with a vertical signboard bolted to one corner: a zakkyo biru (雑居ビル), a mixed-tenancy building. The board is a stack of plates, one per floor — 2F, 3F, B1 for a basement — and it is the only menu the building offers. When a tenant leaves, its plate goes dark and stays dark.

The board is not advertising. It is a directory, written for people who already know the street.

What tends to be where

Second floors take the trades that want daylight and quiet: kissa (喫茶, old-style coffee houses), secondhand bookshops, a barber with two chairs. Third and fourth drift into mahjong parlours and small offices. Higher up the plates turn to katakana and single given names — snack bars, opening around eight. A plate reading 珈琲 rather than コーヒー usually means the shop predates the building's last renovation.

The climb, and the door

The stairwell will be narrow, lit by one fluorescent tube, and lined with cardboard boxes belonging to whoever is on three. That is normal, and not a sign you have wandered somewhere private. Doors are solid, so a hand-lettered card at eye level does the work of a window: hours, a closed day, 準備中 (junbichū, preparing) if you are early.

二階の窓に灯りがあれば、たいていその店は開いている。

Practise where the density is high and the visitors are few — the blocks off Ōtsu-dōri in Nagoya, the arcades around Ichibanchō in Sendai. Carry coins. Some rooms up there still run from a cash tray, and silence behind a door is not an answer; kissa are quiet by design.