There are houses on this street that were built at the beginning of the Edo period. Gojō Shinmachi runs along the Kishū highway, and among its townhouses are dwellings dating from the early seventeenth century. Old houses whose date of construction is actually known are uncommon, and where one survives it becomes a fixed point: everything built afterwards on the same street can be compared against it, and the changes in method read as a sequence.

Turn off the main street into the lanes and they take you down to the Yoshino River, which shows at once that this was a town using both the water and the road. Gojō Shinmachi was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2010, and work on bringing empty townhouses back into use is under way along several stretches of the street. This is the centre of a city of about thirty thousand, Kashihara is roughly forty minutes away by car, and the street is used as an ordinary route rather than being reserved for visitors.

A town always forms where a river crosses a road. Cargo carried by water has to be handed to the land, and cargo carried overland has to be put onto boats, and that exchange requires people, storage and somewhere for both to wait — so Gojō persisted for a long time as the place where the transfer happened. The lanes still run down to the water, and they are still the shortest way there. The plan of the town remembers what the town was for, several centuries after the last cargo boat came up the river and long after anyone had a use for the memory.