Lanterns shaped like goldfish hang under the eaves. Furuichi-Kanaya in Yanai is a street of white-walled buildings, its gable-fronted merchant houses roofed in honkawara tile with substantial ridge-end ornaments above them. The kingyo-chōchin is papier-mâché over bamboo, made here as the town's souvenir, and they are still hung along the frontages rather than kept for a festival week.

Furuichi-Kanaya was designated an Important Preservation District in December 1984, which places it early among the national designations. Yanai station is within walking distance of the street, Iwakuni is about forty minutes away by car, and this being the Inland Sea coast, snow is close to unknown, which is one reason the plaster has survived as well as it has. The ridge ornaments are large for a reason of geometry: in tsumairi building the triangle of the roof faces the street, so the ornament sits in the most conspicuous position available on the whole elevation.

For a gable-fronted merchant house, the front is mostly roof. The height of that roof registers before the width of the frontage does, so money spent on the building tends to migrate upward into the tilework, and the ornaments grew accordingly — competition between neighbours conducted several metres above the ground. Turn the same house through ninety degrees and none of that would have happened, because the ornament would have been out of sight from the road. How a street ends up looking can be settled entirely by which way its buildings were turned, several centuries before anyone thought of it as a view.