The street curves, slowly. Kawaramachi Serimachi is the merchants' quarter of the Hikone castle town, and its single street bends gently along its length, lined with hirairi townhouses and storehouses. Streets in a castle town were bent for two reasons that are usually given together: to break the sight lines for defensive purposes, and because the road was following an older watercourse or the lie of the ground rather than a drawing.

The district was designated an Important Preservation District in July 2016, and a number of the restored buildings are trading as shops, which is a more recent development than the designation and not a consequence of it. Hikone station is within walking distance, and both Kyoto and Nagoya are reachable by train for a commute, which is part of why work on the empty townhouses continues to find takers. A curving street cannot be seen from end to end, and walking it feels considerably longer than the distance on a map suggests it should.

A straight street shows you everything from the entrance. When it bends, what lies ahead is concealed, so a reason to walk as far as the next building is generated over and over — which means an identical length of frontage does more work for the shops along it. The defensive explanation for the bend is the one that gets told to visitors. The commercial consequence was presumably noticed fairly early by the people actually trading on the street, and it has now outlived the defensive purpose by several centuries without anyone needing to redesign anything.