What faces the street here is not a shopfront but a temple gate. Teramachidai occupies the plateau on the left bank of the Saigawa, where temples are gathered in number, and stone bases and plastered walls run along the old Tsurugi highway through the district. Because the gates address the road directly, the street has a character belonging neither to a shopping street nor to an ordinary residential one: long stretches of wall, then an opening with a roof over it, then wall again, repeated for most of a kilometre.

Concentrating temples on high ground outside the castle town is also said to have been a defensive arrangement — somewhere people could be assembled if it came to that — so the layout carries a military logic underneath the religious one. Teramachidai was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2012, the third such designation within Kanazawa. Kōrinbō is within walking distance, schools and shops are close, and a household can live here without needing to leave the city for anything.

A street of temples goes quiet early. With no shops along it, foot traffic falls away as soon as the light does, and for several hours the only thing the street lamps have to work with is the white of the plastered walls. It is the same city, twenty minutes from the teahouse districts, and time passes through it at a completely different rate. Walking the two in a single evening is the quickest way to understand how deliberately Kanazawa was sorted, quarter by quarter, into places that would be busy and places that would not.