Each brewery has a place where you can draw its water. The sake brewery street in Saijō runs for a few hundred metres between white-walled brewhouses under red-tiled chimneys, and what distinguishes it is density: this many breweries within this short a distance is unusual. Each one draws its brewing water from its own well, and each one has somewhere on the street where a visitor can taste it, so the walk can be done as a comparison of water rather than of sake.

The differences are audible in the mouth, which surprises people. Water from wells a few hundred metres apart varies in hardness and in flavour, and those variations carry through into the character of what is brewed with them. Saijō station is immediately adjacent, Hiroshima is about forty minutes away, and there is employment in both the universities and the breweries, so students and brewery workers occupy the same small town. The chimneys are red because they are tiled in the Sekishū manner, and seen along the street they repeat, one after another, in the same profile.

Breweries cluster where water, rice and transport happen to coincide. The railway arrived in the Meiji period and made shipping straightforward; the good water was already here; and the result is a row of brewhouses standing directly beside the station, which is about as legible as industrial geography gets. Most producing districts require some explaining before their location makes any sense to a visitor. In Saijō you can read the reason off the street while walking down it, in the order the industry actually assembled itself.