What this post town is known for now is tofu. Sasanami-ichi sits on the Hagi Ōkan, and red-tiled, white-walled townhouses still line the old road through it. The Ōkan connected Hagi with Yamaguchi, and this settlement, at roughly the midpoint, was where people carrying loads between the two stopped for the night. Terraced fields surround it, the water is good, and there are shops here selling tofu made with that water.

Sasanami-ichi was designated an Important Preservation District in June 2011, and it continues as a small settlement in the hills, farming the terraces that surround it much as it always has. Hagi's town centre is about thirty minutes away by car and Yamaguchi city about forty, which means the village is still roughly equidistant from both — the same position it occupied when the journey was made on foot, expressed in a different unit and over a shorter afternoon. That symmetry is the whole explanation for the place existing.

A post town in the middle loses its function when the towns at either end move closer together. Once the journey takes thirty minutes by car, nobody needs to break it, and so this settlement stopped being a post town not because the road deteriorated but because it improved. That is the awkward mechanism behind most places of this kind. What remains of the street is a record of the period during which travellers stopped here, kept in good order by households who are now passed by at speed several hundred times a day. Nobody in the cars is doing anything wrong. The improvement simply removed the reason to halt.