Yunotsu grew up as the port that shipped out the silver mined at Iwami Ginzan, inland. In the second half of the sixteenth century the silver left from Okidomari, a small inlet just along the coast, and at that point something like a third of the silver circulating in the world was Japanese, most of it from Iwami.

Later the town became a port of call for the kitamaebune coastal traders. Large water jars called hando, along with other Iwami ware, went out from here to the rest of the country.

What remains today is a single street running up a steep narrow valley, cut into the hillside, and it is lined with buildings from the Edo, Meiji, Taisho, and Showa periods, all of them under red Sekishu roof tiles. It is the only hot spring town anywhere in Japan to have been designated an important preservation district for historic buildings.

Inns and small restaurants sit along that one road, some of them in converted old houses. What they serve is what came out of the bay that morning, simmered or sliced raw. The same water that once carried a third of the world's silver now supplies dinner to a dozen or so kitchens on a street you can walk end to end in ten minutes. It is very quiet there.