Out you step, a bit different from the North side. More commercial than the North, a shopping area. Greatly neonlit at night. Taxi cabs, bus stops, a student gathering-place. Tissue handers-out, occasional pensioner-groups, and from time to time Jehovah's Witnesses with pamphlets. Live variety. Intersections.

DLK

In time-honoured Japanese usage Dining room, Living room, Kitchen.The whole esplanade is dotted with fudōsan, estate agents. Window after window of rental-offices advertise rooms, apartments, occasional houses. This is student turf so there are endless one-room or two-room units up for rent. They take their place close to any number of izakayas (lit. ‘liquor store where you linger’ or, in another version, a pub). Centre of the road is bike-parking where there used to be a monorail leading to the Mukōgaoka Amusement Park (Big Amusement Wheel, outdoor theatre, stalls, walkways). The Tsutaya store has floors of CDs, DVDs and videos. There are drug stores and a Games Centre with its youth pinball wizards. Small-rise buildings abound, one topped by a huge bowling-pin, another advertising ‘The West of England College’ (a one-floor language operation), a third the Jinke Trading Company. A mild uphill walk and you can visit Nihon Minka-en in Ikuta Park, a museum site of twenty or so reconstructed East Japan period houses, no small contrast with the shoe-boxes of modern Tokyo. Add yet other nooks and you have a whole if small-scale home and away – Mizuho and like bankbranches, coffee or doughnut shops, a kōban (small police office), flower shops, newspaper kiosks and optical stores, the shoe emporium ABC-MART, and the inevitable American fast-food, McDonalds (makudonarudo), KFC (kentakkī furaido chikin) and Jonathans (jonasan). DLKs. Shopping. Odakyū trains. Mukōgaoka-yūen. All yours.

BREAD-SHOP WITH PASTRY-AND-COFFEE CAFÉ

SCANDINAVIAN NATURAL ROMAN HOKUO (Since 1979). Viking loaves in Mukōgaoka-yūen? You select your bread or cake with a large pair of golden-coloured pincers with plastic orange handles, place everything on the tray, and head to the counter to pay. Hygiene worthy of a hospital operating theatre, even though on the outside parapet there is the faint inscription, a phrase to relish, Scandinavia's Smell.