The fences are black, which makes the green behind them look darker than it is. Kakunodate's samurai quarter runs between long walls of black-painted boards, with the houses and their gardens behind, so that from the street you see only the upper half of the trees. The contrast does the work: leaves in summer, snow in winter, both read stronger against that particular black. The district was designated a preservation area in 1976, and the fences have been repainted ever since by people who live behind them.

Among the houses are workshops making kaba-zaiku, the local craft of cherry bark. The bark is shaved thin, then heated and glued in layers onto a wooden core, and the surface that results is closer to lacquer than to wood — dark, slightly uneven, warm to the hand. Bark taken from different trees, or from the same tree in different years, varies enough in sheen and marking that a good deal of the work happens before any glue is opened: pieces are laid out and sorted, and the sorting takes longer than the gluing. There is a Shinkansen station here, and people commute to Daisen and Morioka; the snow in winter is heavy enough to be a scheduled task rather than an event, which is the difference between living here and visiting in February.

The houses were not built to be looked at. The fences are high in order to hide what is behind them, and the gardens put their expense where the street cannot see it. Standing on the outside admiring the arrangement, you are doing something the design was intended to prevent, which is worth a moment's thought before you take the photograph.