When I was a child there used to be several streets of shops in my neighborhood and we could always see a lot of house wives buying vegetables, meat and so on for the dinner every late afternoon. Most of the shops in the streets have been closed and the streets are now called "shutter streets." We can find these shutter streets all around Japan. It is like a ghost town and only the difference from the real ghost town is that there are a lot of residents in there; they don't have any other places to live in and are staying with no choice. Most house wives now do shopping in supermarkets and younger generation chooses convenience stores. Both of them are run by bigger companies with ample funds. Traditional private shops in the shutter streets seem to have no way to survive and they are vanishing one by one every day. I really miss them. I found this vegetable store in a shutter street running alone but there was no customer around there. I hope it survives even as a historic vegetable shop of 20th century in Japan.
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