The grid is not the grid of a castle town. The jinaichō at Tondabayashi grew around a temple, and Edo-period merchant houses and storehouses stand along streets laid out in a regular grid. A jinaichō is a self-governing town formed with a temple at its core and a moat and earthworks around the outside; the plan was settled by the temple and the townspeople rather than by a lord, which is an unusual origin for a street layout of this regularity in Japan.

Along Shironomon-suji you can see yamatomune roofs: a steeply pitched thatched section combined with tiled slopes on either side, a form particular to this part of the Kansai plain. Tondabayashi was designated an Important Preservation District in October 1997. Kintetsu reaches Tennōji in about thirty minutes, and restoration of the old townhouses continues, with new businesses opening as the work is completed. The streets run straight and the sight lines are long, which is usually explained by priorities: commerce and assembly mattered more here than defence.

In a grid town you always know which way you are facing. That removes the pleasure of getting lost, which is most of what people enjoy about old quarters — and yet walking Tondabayashi does not feel repetitive, because the buildings surviving in each block are of different dates. The street pattern holds still while the frontages change, block after block. It is precisely because the plan is uniform that the differences between the houses become easy to see: with the geometry constant, the only variable left is the buildings, and the eye goes to it.