The 56-year-old Mamichan clearly enjoys her job, chatting away jovially with customers as she cooks and serves drinks at her eponymous yatai, but she tells me it wasn’t always that way. Her husband, with whom she works alongside their 31-year-old son, bought the yatai without asking her when she was just 23 and she had little choice but to pitch in.

Running a yatai is tough work – most open around 6pm and don’t shut until 1am. After closing the yatai needs to be cleaned, packed up and wheeled to its storage spot and most of the day before is spent preparing food.

“At first the motivation was just a way to raise a kid, I didn’t like it,” says Mamichan. “There were many young people the same age as me, they were really fashionable and playing around and I thought, 'Why is it only me doing all this?’”

Over the years though she says she’s developed a sense of pride in her job and a growing appreciation for the great diversity of humanity to which her yatai has exposed her.

"I can meet many people including people from outside Japan from many countries,” she says. “It makes me feel just like I have visited many countries so I don't have to travel around myself."