The signboards outside the inns are lists of names. Akasawa-juku stands partway along the pilgrimage route between Mount Minobu and Mount Shichimen, a stone-paved slope on a hillside with timber-walled lodging houses still standing on both sides of it. Pilgrims came in groups called kō, and each kō had its own regular inn, so the entrance of a lodging house carries dozens of wooden plaques bearing the names of the groups that stayed there. It was designated an Important Preservation District in July 1993.

Fewer than twenty households live here now, and daily life assumes a car. Minobu is about thirty minutes away by road, and because the slope is steep, goods have always had to be brought down from the road above rather than carried up from below, then as now. When pilgrims stopped arriving on foot, the inns were no longer needed for their original purpose — but the buildings are built to the slope, stepped and braced for it, and cannot simply be moved somewhere level. That is the awkward mercy by which villages like this survive.

The plaques were not put up as a record of past custom. They were markers, so that a group returning after some years could find the same inn again and be recognised at the door. A system like that assumes a return visit twenty years later, which tells you how long the horizon was while the pilgrimage was a going concern. Count the plaques on a single entrance and you are counting the number of times somebody climbed this slope deliberately, decade after decade, in order to sleep in the same room they had slept in before.