Only the lower half of the wall is tiled. Jōtō in Tsuyama is a merchants' quarter on the Izumo highway, and the townhouses along both sides carry namako tilework and sodekabe wing walls. The tiling stops at waist height for a practical reason: that is the band the rain splashes back onto, and hardening only that band is cheaper than hardening the whole elevation. Cost is the reason it does not continue upward.

A sodekabe is a short wall projecting from the boundary with the neighbour, put there to stop fire running sideways along the row. Jōtō was designated an Important Preservation District in August 2013, and several buildings including the former Karita residence are open inside. This is a city of about ninety thousand people; Okayama is a little over an hour away by car; and hospitals and shopping are all available within the city itself, so the district functions as one part of an ordinary working place rather than as a preserved fragment of one that has stopped working.

A townhouse wall deteriorates from the bottom. The zone nearest the ground is wetted and dried repeatedly, year after year, and it fails long before anything higher up does — so armouring that zone alone with tile and plaster is a well-judged balance of expense against effect. The pattern that visitors photograph is, in origin, a maintenance decision taken by somebody counting money. As a general rule worth carrying around, the decorated part of a traditional building marks the part that was going to fail first, and the decoration is what the repair was made to look like.