The storehouses are still standing, all over town. Gyōda kept its tabi — the split-toed socks — in earthen-walled and brick warehouses, and a surprising number of them survive scattered through the town centre rather than gathered into a preserved quarter. They were built to hold stock, so the windows are small, the ceilings high, and there is essentially no ornament anywhere on them beyond what the bricklaying itself produced. That plainness does not disappear when a building becomes a museum or a restaurant; inside, in the gaps between the furniture, you are reminded that this was somewhere goods were kept and counted. What distinguishes Gyōda is not one carefully preserved example but the fact that another appears a few streets further on, and then another after that, until you stop photographing them. The quantity is what does the work here.

The Takasaki line commutes to Ōmiya and central Tokyo, and the town is flat enough to cover comfortably by bicycle in a single afternoon, which is the sensible way to see the warehouses. It is a gentle place, and some visitors will find it too quiet for their liking after an hour or two.

The industry has largely gone and the buildings have not, which is the ordinary sequence and rarely this legible. Gyōda made the majority of the country's tabi at one point, which is difficult to picture now and easy to verify from the number of warehouses. The castle was here first and the sock trade grew in its shadow. Most of the buildings are privately owned and only some are open. A town's record can be read in exactly that way, provided enough of the buildings are still standing to be read against each other.