No two houses along it are the same. Seki-juku was a post town on the Tōkaidō, and its streetscape runs for about 1.8 kilometres; walking it from the eastern fork to the western one takes the better part of an hour. The projection of the eaves differs from house to house, and so does the plaster relief work above the openings, which tells you the town was never built at one time. It was replaced piecemeal, over generations, and each replacement is legible from the front.

Seki was designated an Important Preservation District in December 1984, and the coordination extends to how signs and vending machines may be presented on the street. The station is very close, Yokkaichi is about forty minutes away by car, the population continues to fall, and finding uses for the empty townhouses is the standing problem here as in most towns of this kind. Oiwake means the point at which roads divide: Seki has one at each end, and each is the junction of a different highway.

Covering 1.8 kilometres in one visit is, honestly, too much of a good thing. It is still worth walking to the far end, because doing so makes a point that no amount of looking at frontages will make: a post town was a piece of a road, not a settlement that happened to sit beside one, and it was never closed off as a town in its own right. Reach the fork, turn around, and the length of the street you have just walked is the function it performed. Nothing about the individual houses conveys that; only the distance does, which is why the walk is worth the hour it costs.