Gable-fronted and eaves-fronted houses stand mixed along one street. Imajō-juku was a post town on the Hokkoku Kaidō, and both orientations occur along its highway frontage: tsumairi, presenting the triangle of the gable to the road, and hirairi, presenting the long side under the eaves. The roofline therefore changes character from house to house rather than running as one continuous profile.

Buildings that were sake breweries and travellers' inns survive here, and they remain identifiable as such, so the separate functions of a post town can still be matched to the individual structures that housed them rather than being described in general terms. Imajō-juku was designated an Important Preservation District in August 2021, which puts it among the more recent additions. It stands directly in front of Imajō station; Takefu and Tsuruga are each about thirty minutes away by car; and the winters bring a great deal of snow to this part of Fukui.

A post town below a pass has a customer count set by the weather. On days when snow closed the crossing, everybody stopped here, so the number of inns was never sized to the ordinary flow of traffic — it was sized to the number of people who would be stranded on a bad day. That is why Imajō had so many of them, and why the street is longer than the resident population would ever have justified. The town was built to hold a crowd that appeared only when the mountain refused to let anyone through, and it stood half empty for the rest of the year, waiting for weather.