There is a row of zelkova planted behind the warehouses. The Sankyo storehouses stand in a line along the river at Sakata, timber buildings put up to hold rice, with an avenue of zelkova running the length of them at the back. The trees were planted to block the summer sun and to soften the winter wind, which makes them not landscaping but temperature control — equipment for keeping the interior of a warehouse steady.

A path runs along the wall of the storehouses, and walking it you can see that the height of the trees and the height of the buildings are matched to each other rather than being accidental, which is the first hint that the planting was engineering. Rice changes in quality with temperature and humidity, so a warehouse holding it has to manage both, and before mechanical cooling the only available means were siting, construction and planting. Sakata has work in the port and in agriculture, and Shōnai airport offers direct flights to Tokyo, so this is not a place that depends on visitors to the warehouses.

The answer, in an age without refrigeration, was trees. Putting an avenue on the western side of a building stops the afternoon sun from reaching the wall at all, and that alone brings the temperature inside down by several degrees without any power being consumed. The effect is modest in any single afternoon and it is entirely free, which over a warehouse operating for a century adds up to a great deal of rice that did not spoil. The avenue that everybody now photographs was installed as machinery, and it is still doing the job it was planted for.