These farmhouses have gatehouses. Hanazawa is a settlement of about thirty households along a valley on Takakusa-yama, and the road through it is lined with timber-boarded houses fronted by nagayamon — gates with rooms built into both sides, used for storage and for work. A gate of that kind is substantial for a farming village, and the fact that so many of them survive in one valley is what makes the place unusual.

Stone retaining walls and water channels run through the settlement together, and from beside them paths climb away toward the mandarin groves. Hanazawa was designated an Important Preservation District in September 2014. Yaizu station is about twenty minutes away by car, and this is within commuting distance of Shizuoka city, so the households here are rarely solely agricultural any more; a good many combine the groves with salaried work. The valley is narrow enough that the houses are pushed to one side of the road, with the slope and the orange trees taking the other.

Mandarins do better on a slope than on the flat. They get the light and the water drains, so a settlement with no level ground of its own turning to fruit is the obvious move rather than a clever one — and the result is that nearly the entire hillside is under cultivation. The houses are pressed down into the bottom of the valley for exactly the same reason. Every metre of workable slope above them was wanted for the crop, so the living had to be done in the space the trees could not use, which in a valley this narrow is one thin line along the road.