What was traded here was silkworm eggs. Inariyama is a merchant town on the Zenkōji highway, and storehouse-built shops and plastered kura survive along its lanes. The goods were kimono fabric and sanshu — sheets of paper onto which silkworm moths had been induced to lay their eggs, sold to farming households who would raise the worms from them. The whole of next season's sericulture, for an entire district, arrived in the form of a stack of paper light enough for one person to carry under an arm.

Eggs are light, expensive and easily ruined, so storage and transport were the difficult parts of the business, and money went into the buildings accordingly. Inariyama was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2014. Shinonoi is about fifteen minutes away by car, which puts the town inside the commuting range for Nagano, and in one part of the district empty townhouses are being brought back into use, some of them reopening as shops.

A town dealing in things that are light and valuable ends up with disproportionate storehouses. When the value density of the goods is high, the security of the place they are kept is directly connected to what they can be sold for, so there was an unambiguous reason to build for fire and for damp and to build well. The thickness of the walls in Inariyama is the inverse of the weight of what they were built to hold. A whole year's trade could have been carried out of one of these buildings by two people, which is exactly why the walls had to be that thick and the doors that heavy.