The walls and the lanterns come out of the same mountain. Makabe is a rural market town in a stone-producing district, and the buildings — mise-gura storehouses, yakuimon gates — are mixed together along lanes rather than lined up for effect. What you notice first is not the architecture but the stone: granite walls, granite lanterns, granite kerbs, in every street, cut from the mountains that stand behind the town and visible from most of it. The district was designated a preservation area in 2010, by which time the stone had been going out of here for centuries.

The quarries and the masons are still working, which changes the texture of the place entirely; a preserved street with nobody cutting stone in it would look similar and mean something else. Half-finished stone sits at the roadside, and it is not always obvious whether a given piece is a product, a repair, or something waiting to be taken away. There is no railway; Chikusei and Tsukuba are about forty minutes by car, and stone remains what the town does for a living rather than what it used to do, which is a distinction most places with a preserved street cannot make.

What preserves the streets is the cutting of stone, not the admiring of it. If the industry stops, the masons go, and with them the only people who can repair a granite wall when it settles, which walls always eventually do. The word preservation is less useful here than the plain fact that orders keep coming in, which is what pays for the skill that the designation is congratulating. A town can be protected on paper and still lose the hands that built it.