The streets are deliberately offset. Imaichō is a temple town ringed by a moat, and its crossings are staggered rather than square, so that no street can be seen along its whole length. The purpose was defensive: an attacking party loses momentum at every jog in the road. The consequence for a person walking it today is that the view ahead is replaced completely at each corner, several times in a hundred metres.

Several hundred Edo-period townhouses survive inside the moat, and the district was designated an Important Preservation District in December 1993. Kintetsu reaches Osaka in about forty minutes. Repairs to the houses run under a framework of rules and subsidies, which sets out what may be altered and how, and that framework is the reason the number of surviving houses is still counted in the hundreds. Tondabayashi, not far away, is also a jinaichō and chose a regular grid; Imai chose the stagger, so two towns of the same type face the world in opposite ways.

A town you cannot see through feels larger than it is. Because the next corner is the only thing on offer, you keep walking to it, and the accumulated distance is considerably greater than the area would suggest — a defensive layout turning out, four centuries later, to be very well suited to an afternoon on foot. The figure of several hundred surviving houses is hard to grasp from a plan, where the district looks small enough to cross in ten minutes. Walking makes the number credible, and it is the road pattern, built for an entirely different purpose, that makes the walking work.