You can find the street by smell. Black wooden fences run along both sides of it, and behind them soy sauce is being brewed. There is nothing to look at — no windows, no signs of activity. Only the smell comes out.

Brewing has been the island's industry for around four hundred years, since long before anything here was made for visitors. At its height in the Meiji period there were something like four hundred breweries here. Today rather more than twenty remain, standing shoulder to shoulder with the factories that boil seaweed and small fish down into tsukudani.

The old word hishio means something salted and fermented, and this district is called the Village of Hishio after it. Not after a dish, and not after a family or a shrine. The place is named for a process, which is a fairly unusual thing for a place to be named for.

The streetscape of black fences has been designated an industrial heritage site. What that designation protects, strictly speaking, is timber and plaster. What is actually happening in there is slower and less visible than any building: mash in wooden vats, taking its time, doing in a year what the smell in the street reports on daily.