Each residence still has its garden. The samurai street at Chiran runs for about seven hundred metres between stone bases and clipped hedges, and behind them a number of the gardens are open to visitors. Most of them are not composed as enclosed spaces: the hills behind are drawn into the design as borrowed scenery, so the composition extends well past the property line and depends on ground the household never owned.

A water channel runs along the street, and it supplied both the gardens and the households — one line doing both jobs, which is why its route determined where things could be built. Chiran was designated an Important Preservation District in November 1981. Kagoshima city is about an hour away by car, and the surrounding country grows tea, so the households along this street have generally had farmland behind them as well as a garden. The hedges stand at a consistent height along the whole street, and that consistency is attributed not to a rule applied to each house but to the street having settled it collectively over a long period.

Opening a garden is also a way of manufacturing a reason to keep cutting it. Once visitors are expected, the timing of the work is no longer a matter of preference, and the cost of it can be accounted for — so public access functions here as a conservation mechanism rather than as a by-product of one. Being looked at is what holds the shape here, and there is nothing sentimental about saying so. Take the visitors away and the hedges would not last a decade, whatever anybody's intentions were at the beginning of it.