The river water is brought inside the houses. Kamigamo is a district of shake — the residences of families who served Kamigamo Shrine — and earthen walls and gates run along the Myōjin River through it. Each house has its own small earth bridge across the channel, so entering means crossing the water first and then passing through the gate, in that order, every time.

The shake were built to draw water from the river into the property, take it through the garden, and return it to the channel further down. Kamigamo was designated an Important Preservation District in December 1988, and today it functions as a residential neighbourhood in the north of the city. City buses reach Shijō in a little over thirty minutes, so this is central Kyoto in every practical sense despite feeling like the edge of it. Land values and rents are high, so living here comes with conditions attached, and the houses change hands rarely.

Where houses stand in a row along a watercourse, an upstream and a downstream come into being. These were households handling water used in shrine ritual, so the rules about what could be returned to the channel were strict, and those rules reached inward: what the garden could contain, how the water was made to move through it, what could be washed and where. The composition inside the walls was determined, in the end, by the requirements attaching to the water on its way out. It is an unusual case of a private landscape being shaped almost entirely by an obligation owed to the neighbours downstream, and the gardens are the more interesting for it.