Safflower money took the shape of storehouses. Murata's old street runs along a former highway lined with mise-gura — shop-storehouses — and gates finished in black plaster. The merchants who built them made their money between the Edo and Meiji periods trading safflower, used for dye and for cosmetics, and they converted the profit into buildings rather than into land or display. The frontages are uniformly heavy because the goods behind them were uniformly valuable. The district was designated a preservation area in 2014.

Some of the houses open their interiors, and stepping inside corrects an impression: the plots are far deeper than the street frontage suggests, running back a long way from a narrow opening. The depth is where the work happened; the frontage is where the standing was declared, and the two were never confused with one another. Sendai is about fifty minutes by car, which puts the town within reach of the city without being absorbed by it. The town has a population in the ten thousands, and a handful of empty houses have been repaired and put back into use, which is neither a rescue narrative nor a decline one.

The price of a crop becomes the thickness of a wall. Safflower was light, small and expensive, which is an unusual combination, and the buildings here are larger than a town of this size would otherwise have built. They still decide, single-handedly, what the street looks like. Nothing else along it competes for attention, and nothing needs to: the buildings were the point of the money, and the money is long spent.