The road that was a riding ground is now an avenue of cherry trees. Akizuki is a castle town closed in by hills, and along the street known as Sugi no Baba stand samurai gates and earthen walls. A baba was a long, narrow strip of ground kept for exercising horses, and that shape — straight, level, and rather wider than an ordinary lane — happens to be exactly what a tree-lined avenue requires, so the form outlived its original purpose without anyone having to alter a metre of it.

The Kuromon and a nagayamon both survive, which allows the difference between the entrance to a castle town and the entrance to a residence to be seen within a few minutes' walk. Akizuki was designated an Important Preservation District in April 1998, and the designation covers the whole of the small town rather than one street within it. Amagi's town centre is about fifteen minutes away by car and Fukuoka city about an hour by expressway, which makes this an unusually accessible place for somewhere that feels as enclosed as it does. Being ringed by hills, the town gets genuinely humid in summer.

A castle town in the mountains stays small. There is no ground into which it can expand, so the number of streets is limited, the samurai quarter and the merchants' quarter end up close together, and the whole settlement settles at a size that can be walked in an afternoon. None of that was a planning decision, and none of it was a preference. Akizuki can be seen in a day because the topography decided how large the town was allowed to become, and then held it at that size for four centuries without any further intervention.