The storehouse is inside the house. In Masuda the merchant houses were built with the kura absorbed into the main structure, standing under the same roof rather than out in the yard, and the arrangement has a name: uchigura. From the street you would not know. The frontages look like an ordinary run of townhouses, and the district was designated a preservation area in 2013 on the strength of what is behind them.

Go in and walk back, past the living rooms and along the earth-floored passage, and a second building appears indoors — lacquered doors, polished plaster, joinery finished to a standard nobody outside the family was ever meant to admire, lit by whatever light gets that far. The reason is snow, and nothing else. In a place buried for months, a storehouse in the yard is difficult to reach and difficult to keep dry, and bringing it inside solved both problems at once. Yokote's town centre is twenty minutes away by car, the land around grows rice and fruit, and clearing snow is an annual cost rather than an occasional inconvenience.

The best part of the house cannot be seen from outside. The money went into the depth rather than the frontage, into the part that gets used rather than the part that gets looked at. You cannot learn this by walking the street, which is exactly the point, and is as good a description of the town's character as any. The houses are not hiding; they simply never saw a reason to explain themselves to passers-by, and the town has kept that habit into an age that rewards the opposite.