Water channels run through the middle of the town. Chikugo-Yoshii is a country market town on an old highway, its white-plastered storehouse-built merchant houses standing along the street with channels running between them. The water is irrigation drawn from the river: it was cut to serve the paddy fields, and it passes through the town on its way there rather than having been provided for the town at all.

There is a working sake brewery, and the garden of one of the old houses is open to visitors, so the abundance of water in this district shows up directly in the kinds of business that took root along the street. Chikugo-Yoshii was designated an Important Preservation District in December 1996, comparatively early among the market towns on the list. Orchards surround the town, Kurume is about thirty minutes away by car and Hakata a little over an hour, and in recent years a number of shops have opened here run by people who came from elsewhere.

An irrigation channel changes the character of the ground it crosses. Once water arrives reliably, the area under rice increases; a trade in rice and then in sake follows; and the merchants handling that trade become able to afford buildings with white plastered walls. The sequence runs in that order and not the other way round, which is worth holding on to when a town looks prosperous. The impressive part of this streetscape begins a little after the date the channel was cut, and the gap between the two dates is the interval it took for water to become money.