The funaya of Ine Bay are houses built directly over the water, with their ground floors serving as garages for fishing boats. The boat enters from the sea, is moored inside the building, and the family lives on the floor above. About two hundred and thirty of these structures line the bay, their facades at the waterline, their rooflines rising in a continuous rhythm around the bay's perimeter. Seen from the water — from one of the sightseeing boats that makes circuits of the bay — the funaya present a view that has no equivalent in Japan: the marriage of domestic architecture and working harbor compressed into a single building type, repeated around an entire bay. The designation as an Important Traditional Building Preservation District reflects what everyone who visits already perceives: this is a place worth protecting because it cannot be recreated. Ine is two hours by car from Kyoto, through the mountains of the Tango Peninsula. The journey is part of the experience. The town at the end of it is small, the pace is the pace of a fishing village, and the funaya are not a spectacle arranged for visitors — they are the working buildings of a community that has lived this way for centuries and continues to do so.