A mizubune assigns its uses from the top down. Kitamachi in Gujō Hachiman is a castle town threaded by the Yoshida River and by open channels, and set along the streets are mizubune — linked stone tanks — together with washing places. The top tank holds drinking water. The next is for rinsing vegetables and dishes, and the one below that takes whatever is dirtiest, the water passing downward through the sequence in that order.

The townhouses carry sodekabe, short wing walls projecting from the frontage at the boundary with the neighbour, put there to stop fire from running along the row. Gujō Hachiman Kitamachi was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2012. This is the centre of a town of some ten thousand people, and Gifu is a little over an hour away by express bus. Because the channels run beside the streets rather than under them, there is nowhere in the town where moving water cannot be heard, and the sound changes with the season and the weather upstream.

Sharing water requires an agreed order of use. Rather than write that order down and hope, this town built it into the object: the tanks are stacked so that a person washing at the wrong level is doing something visibly wrong, and the upstream household physically cannot foul what the downstream household drinks. The rule is the shape of the equipment, which means it does not depend on anyone remembering it. That the water here has stayed clean for as long as it has is less a matter of local virtue than of somebody, a long time ago, having thought carefully about the design of a stone tank.