The slats in the lattice are split remarkably fine. Yoshihisa was a country town that prospered as a collecting point for rice, and two-storey wooden townhouses still stand along the old highway through it. The frontages carry samanoko, a lattice of very narrow slats set close together; the more slats there are, the harder it is to see in from the street, while the person inside sees out perfectly well.

That combination was the requirement. A town handling rice had constant traffic through its shopfronts and needed the street side open for business, so what it wanted was joinery that could stay open and still conceal — and a fine lattice is the answer to that specification. Yoshihisa was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2020, which makes it one of the more recent additions to the national list. It lies on the north side of Takaoka, with the railway and the Manyōsen tram both available, and Toyama city about forty minutes away by car.

Splitting that many slats costs material and it costs labour, considerably more than a coarser lattice would. When an entire street is finished to the same specification, the implication is not that somebody imposed a standard but that the money to meet it was available, house after house, for long enough that the street filled in. A frontage of that fineness is, read one way, a record of what rice was worth here — and, more precisely, of how many consecutive good years the town had while it was doing its building. Streets like this one do not get finished during a bad decade.