The fencing is made of ship planking. Hashitate was a village of kitamaebune shipowners, and what runs along its lanes is a combination of red-tiled roofs, board fences built from reused hull planking, and retaining walls of blue-green local stone. The owners were merchants who happened to own vessels rather than sailors, so their houses stand not at the harbour but slightly inland and slightly above it, at a comfortable distance from the working water.

The main house that now serves as a museum makes the scale of the money plain: the thickness of the timbers, the number of rooms, the finish on things that did not need finishing. Hashitate was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2005. Kaga-Onsen station is about fifteen minutes away by car, and the Shinkansen stops there. This is an exposed coast with a hard winter wind, and both the board fences and the stone walls are built heavier on the side that takes it.

The kitamae trade was not a freight business. A shipowner bought where a commodity was cheap and sold where it was dear, and the margin between the two was the whole of the profit — so earnings depended not on how many voyages were completed but on how accurately the prices had been judged before setting out. That is a trade in information as much as in goods. The size of the houses in this village is a record of how often the judgement turned out to be right, standing at the end of a lane, in full view of the neighbours who had judged the same market differently and were living with the result.