Look up and there is not a single overhead cable. Tsumago-juku, a post town on the Nakasendō, keeps the air above its street empty by burying the power lines and holding down the size and colour of signage. Stone paving survives, and so does the masugata, the double right-angle bend built into the road as a defensive device, which means the view ahead closes off abruptly twice as you walk the town. It was designated an Important Preservation District in September 1976, and it is the usual starting point for the walk over the pass to the next post town, a route enough people now take on foot that the two towns run a service for carrying luggage between them.

Nan-Nagiso station is about ten minutes away by car. The work here is inns and souvenirs, and the population has continued to fall. Burying cables and restraining signs are rules that cost the people who live under them — in money, in convenience, in what they may do to their own frontage — and keeping to those rules for half a century is the harder half of what has been achieved here. The buildings were the easy part.

Maintaining an empty sky requires somebody to make a decision every year, indefinitely. Each new service that has to reach a house is a fresh conversation about where the cable will run and what it may be attached to, so this quietness is a condition with an ongoing maintenance cost rather than a state of preservation. Few visitors look up at all, and fewer register an absence rather than a presence. That absence is the most labour-intensive thing in the town.