There are around fifty temples and shrines on this hillside. The Utatsu foothills district in Kanazawa gathers them along the slope, connected by stepped lanes that turn back on themselves between earthen walls, with ordinary townhouses standing in among the religious buildings rather than separated from them. Placing temples together at the outer edge of a castle town was a principle of how Kanazawa was planned: three such groups, this one and Teramachidai and a third, effectively ring the castle.

Utatsusan-roku was designated an Important Preservation District in November 2011. It is immediately next to Higashi Chaya, so the two can be walked in sequence, and the transition between them takes about a minute and changes everything about the noise level. Slopes are the defining condition here, and they decide almost everything else about how the district is used. The station is fifteen minutes away by bus, and the district functions as an ordinary residential neighbourhood, which is worth stating because visitors often assume otherwise.

When temples cluster, the sky opens up over their precincts. Even in a district as densely built as this one, each temple grounds is a gap, and climbing the hill you meet those gaps in succession, so the view keeps opening and closing without any of it being designed as a sequence. The relief you feel while walking here is not a response to architecture. It is temple land functioning as white space on a crowded hillside, and there is a great deal more of it in this district than the density of the buildings would lead anyone to expect.