There are very large houses standing in the middle of the rice fields. Kondō in Gokashō is a farming village where the main houses of Ōmi merchants stand together, with water channels running between white plastered walls and funaita-bei — fences built from the planking of retired boats. Reusing timber that has already proved itself against water is a sensible piece of thinking, and it produced a fence with a texture nothing else has.

The merchants traded in other provinces and brought the proceeds home to build, which is why houses of this scale ended up in a village rather than in a commercial town. Kondō was designated an Important Preservation District in December 1998, and several of the residences are open, interiors and gardens together. Notogawa station is about fifteen minutes away by car, some residents commute by JR toward Kyoto and Osaka, and because this is flat country the snow is comparatively light.

A main house was not built where the money was made. The rule these families worked to was that business happened elsewhere and the household stayed in the home village, so what you get is a settlement whose houses are conspicuously out of proportion to it — no shops, no through traffic, and a run of substantial gated residences behind long white walls. It looks like an error in the record until you know the arrangement, and then it looks like the most rational thing in the world. White walls standing between a water channel and a paddy field are what that arrangement looks like on the ground, two centuries after the last of the trading was done.