The houses are packed along a single road. Kōnoura occupies an inlet on Azuchi-Ōshima, a port settlement in which gable-roofed, eaves-fronted townhouses stand tightly together along one continuous street, with almost nothing set back from it. The flat ground inside the inlet is narrow, so the houses are pushed up against both sides of the road and gain their floor area by running back rather than by spreading out.

Lanes drop from the street down to the landing places, connecting each house to the water by the shortest route available — which is what a village builds when the boat is the household's single most valuable possession. Kōnoura was designated an Important Preservation District in June 2008. The ferry from Hirado takes a little under an hour, and it is the only connection, so the timetable governs how long any visit lasts. The population is in the hundreds, and life on the island turns on fishing and farming, in that order, with the farming filling the parts of the year the sea does not.

In an island port, houses and boats compete for the same flat ground. Somewhere to keep the vessels and somewhere to dry the nets have to be secured before anything else, because without them there is no income at all, so the dwellings take whatever is left over after the working requirements are met. The compression you see in the streetscape is the result. It looks like crowding and it is actually a form of deference: the houses stand close together because they gave the flat ground to the boats first. Reverse that priority and the village would have starved inside a generation, however comfortable the houses were.