Part of the roof is pushed up into a box. Kamijō is a village of sericulture farmhouses on a slope, and each one has a section of its gabled roof raised — tsukiage-yane, the push-up roof — to vent heat and humidity out of the rearing rooms below. From outside it reads as a second set of windows sitting up on top of the roof, which is more or less exactly what it is, and it makes these farmhouses recognisable from a considerable distance across the valley.

Kamijō was designated an Important Preservation District in July 2015. Between the houses are vineyards: when sericulture ended here the land went over to fruit, so the same slopes that grew mulberry now grow grapes, and the transition happened without the settlement moving or reorganising itself. Enzan station is about fifteen minutes away by car and Kōfu about thirty, and from between the rows of vines you look out across the whole of the Kōfu basin, which is the view the households here have always had while working.

A slope earns you sunlight and drainage at the same time. Mulberry for silkworms and fruit trees want the same two things, so when the crop changed the actual use of the land barely changed with it — the terraces, the aspect, the water, all of it carried over. That is why this village came through a complete change of industry without any visible disruption to its plan, while settlements that depended on a single crop did not. The only thing left over from the previous economy is the shape of the roofs, which are expensive to alter and which nobody has ever had a pressing reason to remove.