The houses are enclosed by planted trees. Tokorogo is a farming settlement spread across the lower slopes of Mount Daisen, and its farmhouses are large, standing behind earthen walls inside their own belts of woodland. That woodland is not decorative. It breaks the wind, catches the snow, and supplies timber and firewood, so it is best understood as part of the equipment of the household rather than as a garden around it.

A water channel circulates through the settlement, and each house can draw from it, which means the same water reaches the gardens and the fields. Tokorogo was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2013, and it is one of relatively few farming villages on the national list, most of which are towns. Yonago is about thirty minutes away by car and Nawa station is close by. The farmland here is extensive and there are lodging businesses in the surrounding area, so as farming villages go this one has held on to a workable scale rather than thinning out.

A large farmhouse comes from the need to process a harvest indoors. Drying the cut rice, threshing it, and getting it into bales all had to happen under a roof, and doing that required a wide earth-floored work area — so the size of the house was determined by the volume of the crop and by the number of operations that could not be done outside. Everything else follows from that one requirement. The trees and the wall are the outer layer of the same equipment, protecting the large building that the harvest had made necessary in the first place, and the three parts are best read together rather than separately.