The stone walls are thick with moss. Kaseda Fumoto follows the Manose River, and what runs along its lanes is a combination of stone bridges, heavily mossed retaining walls and hedges of inumaki. Moss grows this well because the district is warm and wet, so even among the Satsuma fumoto — all built to the same system — the walls look substantially different according to how much moisture a particular valley holds.

Inumaki tolerates salt wind and dry spells, and it puts out dense growth when it is cut back hard, which is why it became the standard hedging plant across the whole of southern Kyushu rather than a local preference. Kaseda Fumoto was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2019, one of the more recent designations, and a number of residence gates still face directly onto the lanes. This is the centre of a city of about thirty thousand people, Kagoshima city is roughly an hour away by car, and the mild climate supports a good deal of agriculture in the country around it.

Towns built under one system still end up looking different from one another. Izumi, Iriki and Kaseda are all samurai districts produced by the same tojō arrangement, and yet the stone available, the plant chosen for hedging and the amount of moisture in the air differ enough that walking them in succession feels like visiting three unrelated places. The institution itself travelled across the domain without any difficulty at all, since it was only a set of rules. The materials could not be carried anywhere, and it is the materials rather than the rules that a visitor actually sees.