The mountain stands at the end of the street. Honchō-dōri in Fujiyoshida runs straight toward Mount Fuji, and along both sides of it stand Shōwa-period kanban-kenchiku — buildings whose front elevations alone were remade in a Western manner, each one detailed a little differently from its neighbour.

Weaving mills are scattered through the surrounding area, working with very fine yarns, and textiles have been produced in this basin for a long time, well before the town became known for anything else. The reasons given are environmental: the altitude, the cold water and the low humidity all suit the handling of thin thread, which breaks readily in warmer and damper conditions. The Fujikyū railway and express buses connect the town to Shinjuku, and in recent years a number of businesses have opened in houses that had stood empty for years, which has changed the mix along the street without changing any of its buildings.

A street with a mountain closing the view behaves differently from an ordinary one. Wherever you stand along it, the same object is in front of you, so the mountain registers before any of the shop signs do and the whole street reads as a single composition rather than as a sequence of frontages. That arrangement was not planned by anyone; the road simply happens to point that way, and it did so long before anyone thought of the view as an asset. The number of people photographing it now follows directly from that alignment rather than from anything the town itself has done, which the town is well aware of.