Each storehouse has its own small stone bridge. Utsubuki-Tamagawa in Kurayoshi runs along the Tamagawa, a narrow channel, with white-walled storehouses under red tiles standing on one bank. There is no road between the water and the buildings, so every storehouse has a bridge of its own crossing to its door, and reaching an entrance means crossing a bridge that belongs to that building alone.

Kurayoshi was designated an Important Preservation District in December 1998. Sake brewers are still trading here as ordinary businesses, and the street works as a place people live and shop before it works as a place to visit. This is a city of forty-odd thousand; Tottori and Yonago are each about an hour away by car, and hospitals and schools are all present, which makes it a functioning centre rather than a preserved fragment. The red tiles are fired hard so that they resist cracking in the cold, so the colour of the roofline is a direct consequence of the climate on this coast.

Streetscapes with one bridge per house are not common anywhere. What produced this one was a decision to bring the river inside the property line instead of keeping it on the far side of a public road — and the reason was probably domestic rather than commercial. Water was equipment: somewhere to wash, somewhere to bring goods up out of a boat. Put the washing place and the loading place in the same spot, on the far side of a channel from the street, and the bridge stops being an ornament and becomes the only way in — which is why there are so many of them, and why none of them is decorated.