Both the honjin and the waki-honjin are still standing. Yakage was a post town on the San'yō road, and it retains the principal lodging used by travelling daimyō together with the secondary one that took the overflow. A honjin is less an inn than a residence: it has a gate appropriate to rank and a sequence of rooms in which where you slept was determined by who you were, with no possibility of negotiation.

White plaster and namako tilework run along the townhouses on both sides of the highway, and the length of the street is a direct measure of how large the post town needed to be. Yakage was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2020, and Yakage station on the Ibara railway is immediately at hand. Kurashiki is about forty minutes away by car, Fukuyama is close enough to commute to, and the population of the town is in the ten thousands, which is small for a place with two buildings of this kind in it.

A surviving honjin is genuinely uncommon. The buildings were too large to maintain and their function evaporated after the Meiji restoration, so most were demolished within a generation or two — which makes two of them surviving in one town a matter of several conditions happening to coincide. What these two buildings preserve is not mainly architectural, and photographing the exteriors misses it entirely. The status system that governed travel on the road is recorded in how the rooms were divided and in what order they were entered, and that is legible from inside in a way the frontage will never be.