These white-walled townhouses are built in the igura manner. Kuroki is a country market town along the Yabe River, and igura-zukuri houses — plastered as thickly as a storehouse — stand in a row along the old highway. The construction is fire-resistant, and the point of it was that trade goods could be kept inside the house itself rather than in a separate building at the back.

Walk along the street and it brings you to a shrine with a large wisteria trellis, which in spring fills completely with people standing underneath the flowers. Kuroki was designated an Important Preservation District in June 2009, which put a district that had never been on any itinerary onto the national list. The country around it grows tea and fruit, Yame's town centre is about twenty-five minutes away by car and Kurume about fifty, and the town continues along the flat ground beside the river rather than climbing away from it.

The houses in a market town are as thick-walled as warehouses because they were both shop and warehouse at once. In a business that collects agricultural produce and sells it on, the place the goods are stored and the place they are sold are the same building, so the storage requirement pulled the construction of the living quarters along with it. Nobody chose to live inside a strongbox for the pleasure of it, and the rooms behind these walls are darker than they would otherwise be. A street of white plastered walls is, among other things, a record of what used to be stacked behind them and of how much it was worth.