The roofs present their triangles to the street. The merchant houses of Kawaramachi are built tsumairi — with the gable end, the face at right angles to the ridge, turned toward the road — so the skyline along the street is a run of triangles rather than a continuous horizontal eave. It is often explained as a survival from the period when tax was assessed on the width of a frontage: narrow at the street, and very long back into the plot.

The district was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2004. Walk a few hundred metres and you are in the samurai quarter, with the castle site beyond it, so the character of the town changes completely inside the distance of a short stroll. Shops along the street sell Tamba ware and the local black soybeans, which are the two things most people leave with, Osaka is about an hour away by expressway, and there is both work on empty townhouses and an established route into farming for people who want it.

Castle towns were laid out by rank, quarter by quarter. In Sasayama the merchant and samurai districts both survive, and the boundary between them announces itself without any need for a map: the width of the street changes, and so does the way the houses meet it. A tsumairi row and a hirairi row are not variations of taste; they are different trades, different tax positions, often different centuries of building. The shape of a town remembers the order in which people were allowed to live in it, and it goes on remembering long after the ranks it recorded have stopped mattering to anyone.