The lattice is put together differently in every lane. Honmachi in Takehara is a street of nurigome merchant houses, fully plastered, and the spacing and pattern of the wooden lattice varies from house to house, so the differences can be compared within a single row rather than remembered between towns. Salt production and sake brewing made this town wealthy, and the scale of the buildings shows it: wide frontages, one after another, which is not what a town of this size would ordinarily have.

Takehara was designated an Important Preservation District in December 1982. Climbing the steps at Saihō-ji brings you out above the district, looking down on the roofs. Kure is about fifty minutes away by car and Hiroshima an hour and a half; there are hospitals and shops in the town, so this is a place with the ordinary equipment of life rather than a preserved fragment. From above you read the run of the roofs, and from below you read the lattice, so the same street gets seen twice from two heights.

The lattice was one of the few parts a household could choose for itself. Wall colour and roof form were effectively settled by local convention, but the width of the slats and the gaps between them were open, so that is where the differences went — and where they have stayed. It is generally worth asking, in any streetscape that looks uniform at first, which element was actually left to the owner to decide. That is where the personality collected, because it had nowhere else available to go, and it is usually a smaller detail than a visitor expects.