The colour of the cedar ball tells you when the sake was made. Sanmachi in Takayama is a merchant district of latticed townhouses, and the breweries hang a sugidama — a sphere of cedar sprigs — under the eaves. A fresh one is green, put up when the new sake is ready, and it browns as the months pass, so the colour of the ball outside a brewery is a calendar anyone in the street can read without asking.

Sanmachi was designated an Important Preservation District in February 1979. Along Kami-Sannomachi and the two streets beside it are sake brewers, miso makers and shops occupying old townhouses, close enough together that the smell changes every few doors. Down by the river a morning market sets up daily, vegetables and pickles and handwork on trestles, so the visitors' street and the market that supplies local kitchens are a few minutes apart and operate at different hours. This is the middle of the city, with hospitals and ordinary shops to hand; Nagoya is a little over two hours away by limited express, which makes Takayama one of the more straightforward places to live in Hida, whatever the preserved streets suggest.

A lattice door separates inside from outside while letting sound and air through. That is why the voices from the morning market carry into the houses, and why a building type that never fully closes off the street suited a town whose business was holding markets. The cedar ball and the lattice are doing the same job in different materials: both of them are devices for telling the street something without anybody having to say it.