As his father and his grandfather did before him, Tetsuya Otsuka sells a little bit of everything in the family housewares shop.
Plates and cups, tissues and toilet paper, even decorative plastic flowers crowd the shelves of his small store on a narrow street in Urayasu, a city just east of Tokyo.
But the future is dark for Otsuka, who fears being forced out of business by the discount shops and supermarkets that are highly popular among Japan's increasingly stingy shoppers.
"We may be all right for now," the fiftyish Otsuka said. "But over the longer term, things are very, very hard to predict. The supermarkets could destroy us."
That would end a proud four-generation tradition that began in 1874.
Otsuka is far from alone in his woes, however, as the world's second-largest economy continues to take a beating. Recent data has reinforced views that Japan's economy is slipping back into recession, and consumer spending remains sluggish.
As a result, the retail world is being rocked and virtually everyone suffers -- even Otsuka's nemesis, the supermarkets.
Nationwide retail sales fell 1.6 percent in May from a year earlier, while department store sales fell 0.4 percent from a year earlier. Sales at larger stores fell 3.2 percent for the 37th consecutive month.
"In the future, the big will get bigger through consolidation and the small will have to find a niche," said Michael Jacobs, a retail analyst with Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.
"The mom-and-pop stores have to differentiate or die."
Otsuka's store is around 10km from the soaring turrets of the Cinderella Castle at Tokyo Disneyland, which has put Urayasu on Japan's tourist map since it opened in 1983.
But even the fact that 17 million people are lured to the city each year by the likes of Mickey Mouse has done nothing for the one-street Hokuei shopping district where Otsuka and others struggle to save stores that, in many cases, their families have run since the 19th century.
The street that once bustled with farmers in town for a day and local fishermen back from the sea now is a silent place with only an occasional elderly bicyclist passing by.
"From morning to night people were coming and going, buying and selling things," said 57-year-old Toshie Bessho, whose family has run a shop selling futon quilts for over one hundred years.
"But once transport got better and the supermarkets came in, things really got bad," she added. "Now we have days where nobody will come in to buy anything."
Both the variety of goods available at supermarkets, and their lower prices, are major lures for customers, Otsuka said.
"People can buy anything there -- and some are really cheap. At that kind of price, there's no way we could break even."
The prices at small retailers have long been high due to margins paid to wholesalers and distributors, which Dresdner's Jacobs said was part of the problem.
And places such as an appliance store run by Kinichi Shibata, a once-typical neighbourhood outlet selling only one company's goods -- in his case, Panasonic -- suffer further handicaps.
"The little electronics shops can only sell the goods of one manufacturer, and then only at the recommended prices," said Jacobs. "That's why the discounters do so well. They have all the different TVs lined up right there and they can discount."
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