The space under the eaves is the pavement. In Wakasa the frontages carry kariya — a covered walkway formed by the overhang of the roofs — so you can pass along in front of the shops without ever leaving cover. The snow here is deep, and the point of the arrangement is that on days when the road itself is unusable, people can still move from house to house along the fronts of the buildings, doing the day's business without going out into it.

The town was rebuilt after a fire, and the form it took was a line of storehouses set on raised stone bases, standing at a consistent height above the road. Wakasa was designated an Important Preservation District in August 2021, one of the newest entries on the national list and one of the smallest towns on it. This is the centre of a town of just under three thousand people; Tottori city is about fifty minutes away by car; and it is the terminus of the Wakasa railway, which is the kind of detail that tells you where a place sits in a network.

A town rebuilt after a fire comes back more regular than it was. Everything goes up at once, so heights and dimensions match in a way they never do when a street accumulates over two centuries — and whatever the community has learned in the meantime can be built in from the start. The kariya at Wakasa is a product of that reconstruction rather than an inheritance from before it. A surprising number of the most uniform streetscapes in the country date from the period immediately after a disaster, which is worth remembering when a town looks unusually coherent.