A merchant quarter and a teahouse quarter, side by side. Obama Nishigumi is a district where the two adjoin, with latticed townhouses running along the streets of both. In the part called Sanchōmachi the houses carry degōshi — lattice that projects out over the road — painted with bengara, so that both the colour and the way the frontage steps forward distinguish those streets at a glance from the merchant blocks a few minutes away.

A projecting lattice makes it easier to see out from inside, which tells you what it was for: it is the joinery of a household waiting for customers to arrive rather than one going out to find them. Obama Nishigumi was designated an Important Preservation District in June 2008. This is the centre of a city of about thirty thousand, JR Obama station is close, and Kyoto is roughly an hour and a half away by car — the town sits at the head of the route by which the Wakasa coast supplied the old capital.

The two quarters are adjacent because they served the same customers. A trade that moves goods generates a constant traffic of people and a good deal of entertaining, so the place where deals were made and the place where they were celebrated needed to be a few minutes apart — near enough to walk between them after dark without arranging anything. The town was never split into a working half and a pleasure half, and the boundary between the two quarters is not marked by anything except a change in the frontages. Its layout is a fairly exact drawing of how the business was actually conducted, hour by hour, by the same people.