There is a channel of running water in front of the houses. Ōuchi-juku is a row of thatched, hipped-roof houses on both sides of an old highway, with an open water channel running the length of the street in front of them. It was dug for drinking and washing, and in summer people still stand bottles in it to keep them cold, which is the kind of use that outlasts the reason for the design. The water is audible from most of the street, and it is the first thing you notice after the roofs. The district was designated a preservation area in 1981, and the roofs are the reason it was noticed at all.

Rethatching is not a job a household can do alone. It takes dozens of pairs of hands, and the houses take their turn in a rotation that runs over years rather than seasons, so the roof you are looking at was put on by most of the village. Climb the slope at the end of the street and the whole post town lies below you, the ridges lined up in the same direction, which is easier to see from above than from the road. Shimogō's centre is fifteen minutes away by car, Aizu-Wakamatsu about an hour, and the snow in winter is deep enough to be the reason the roofs are shaped as they are rather than a hardship somebody mentions afterwards.

Thatch does not survive without people. The scarce material is not the reed but the number of hands willing to turn up on the day, and this street survives because that number has held. Standing in it, looking up, you are looking less at a roof than at a record of whose turn it was, and of who came when they were asked.