There are storehouses built for nothing but festival floats. Shimo-Ninomachi Ōshinmachi continues north from Sanmachi as a merchant district, with a long run of townhouses under deep eaves and projecting lattice. Standing on the street among them are yatai-gura: storehouses with tall, narrow doors, built to hold the wheeled floats that are pulled through the town at festival time, and built to hold nothing else at all for the rest of the year.

The district was designated an Important Preservation District in July 2004, and working sake breweries trade along the same frontages, so the street has business going on in it rather than only being looked at. This is the middle of Takayama, so the ordinary services of a town are here, and the limited express reaches Nagoya or Toyama in a little over two hours. Compared with Sanmachi there are far fewer people walking, and although the buildings are of the same kind, the pace and the sound of the street are entirely different — which is the reason to come this way.

A float storehouse is a building used for a few days a year. Keeping such a thing on prime frontage in the centre of a town, generation after generation, is a statement about what the year is organised around: the festival is the fixed point and everything else is fitted to it. The arrangement of the buildings is the priority list, written where anyone can read it. It is generally the structures standing empty for most of the year that tell you what a place actually values, rather than the ones in daily use, which only tell you what it needs.