The ground floor is where the boat is parked. A funaya at Ine is a two-storey building standing at the edge of the sea, with a slipway on the ground floor for hauling the boat in and living space above it. They stand in a line that follows the curve of the bay, and from the road along the shore you can see the slipway floors running down into the water without any step or wall between the building and the sea.

This only works because the tidal range in Ine Bay is small and the water inside it is calm; settlements facing open sea never developed the form, whatever their fishing was like. Ine-ura was designated an Important Preservation District in July 2005. Miyazu is about forty minutes away by car, and the work here is fishing and running guesthouses. Empty funaya are increasingly being converted into accommodation, and in some the room you sleep in is the ground floor where a boat used to sit.

Leaving the ground floor of your house open to the sea means deciding that the convenience of launching every morning matters more than what could come in on the tide. If fishing is the centre of a household's life, keeping the boat as close as physically possible is the rational arrangement, and this view is what happens when an entire village reaches that conclusion and none of them is overruled. The buildings are unusual, and photographs of them travel a long way. The reasoning behind them is the most ordinary reasoning there is, applied without exception, by everybody, for a very long time — which is the only way a whole bay comes to look like one decision.