The plots are startlingly large, one after another. Izumi Fumoto is a samurai district built under the Satsuma tojō system, and its residences stand behind stone bases and clipped hedges on plots that have never been subdivided. Tojō meant not concentrating the domain's force in a single castle but settling samurai in defended clusters throughout the territory, with a fumoto — a settlement at the foot of a fortified hill — at each of those points.

The men living in them farmed for roughly half their living, which changes what a residence has to contain: room for fields, room for a barn, room for the tools and the animals. That is why the plots here are so much larger than in an ordinary castle town, and why the district covers so much ground for the number of households in it. Izumi Fumoto was designated an Important Preservation District in December 1995, and several of the samurai houses are open to visitors, which is the only way to see how the farming half of the household was accommodated. This is a city of about fifty thousand; Izumi station on the Kyushu Shinkansen is ten minutes away by car; Kumamoto is a little over forty minutes off.

A defensive arrangement became a way of living, and then a shape on the ground. Because the fighting strength was dispersed rather than gathered at the capital, each fumoto stayed small while the number of them grew, and Kagoshima consequently retains several samurai districts built to the same pattern. The spaciousness of Izumi is not a sign of wealth, and it is not a sign of rank either. It is what a policy of dispersal looks like once it has been drawn on the ground as plots and left there for four hundred years.