Each house has a folding bench attached to its front. On Teba-jima the frontages are built in the mise manner: a hinged bench fixed to the street side of the house, which folds down when it is wanted and folds flat when it is not. Put down, it is a place to sit; put up, it is simply wall again, and the lane in front of it is clear — which matters, because these lanes are not wide enough to lose any of.

No cars come onto the island, so the paths are sized for people and handcarts and nothing else, and they have never had to be widened for anything. Teba-jima was designated an Important Preservation District in February 2017, and the boat over from Mugi takes about fifteen minutes, which is the only way anybody arrives. The population is in the tens, and the school closed long ago. Shops and medical care are on the mainland, which is the arithmetic every small island lives inside, and it shapes the age of the population more than anything else does.

Where the lanes are narrow, the front of a house becomes public space. The bench turns that arrangement on and off: down, and the neighbours sit; up, and it is a thoroughfare again — so the boundary between the house and the road is moved through the day rather than fixed by a property line. Somewhere with no spare land makes space out of time instead of area. It is a solution that costs nothing in materials and requires only that everybody understands the convention, which on an island of this size has never been a difficulty. Try the same arrangement in a town and it would need a by-law.