White walls and wooden lattice, laid out on a grid. Mameda-machi in Hita is a district of plastered storehouses and latticed townhouses along streets set out in a regular grid, and each street has a slightly different character despite the uniform plan. Hita spent a period under direct shogunal administration, and money moved through it: the merchants here grew powerful in finance as much as in goods, and the number of surviving storehouses reflects that.

Mameda was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2004, and the walk through it takes in working sake brewers and a number of small museums, most of them in buildings that were something else first. Kurume is about fifty minutes away by car, there is work in woodworking and food processing, and the surrounding country is known for its cedar. The storehouses were not only for goods. A merchant who lent money needed somewhere fireproof for ledgers and cash, and a kura is precisely the building type that answers that requirement, which is why a town of lenders ends up looking like a town of warehouses.

Rank in a merchant town is recorded in the number of storehouses. Frontage width and the fineness of the lattice can be managed for effect; what cannot easily be faked is how many kura are standing behind the house, and that is where the money actually shows. It follows that the informative part of Mameda is not the street itself. Walk the side lanes and look into the yards behind the houses, and a good deal becomes legible that the frontages were arranged, deliberately and at some expense, to keep quiet about.