There are rows of small tiled ledges running across the walls. On the white walls of Kiragawa you find mizukiri-gawara: courses of roof tile fixed partway up the wall, several to a storey. They exist to intercept water running down the plaster and throw it clear before it can soak in, which matters here because typhoon rain does not fall so much as arrive sideways, and a wall that stays wet is a wall that will not last.

On the inland side of the village are ishiguro, walls of stacked stone, which do the other job: breaking the wind before it reaches the houses. Kiragawa was designated an Important Preservation District in October 1997, and walking up from the shore toward the hills takes you past both defences in sequence, arranged in the order the weather makes necessary. Muroto's town centre is fifteen minutes away by car and Kōchi city about two hours, which puts this village a long way from anywhere that could help it in a hurry. Typhoons still come through, on the same track they always did.

What looks like ornament is usually a countermeasure. A wall with many courses of mizukiri-gawara appears more elaborate than one with few, and it is tempting to read the difference as ambition or wealth; but the number of courses follows from the height of the wall and how the rain strikes it, so the pattern is set by necessity rather than by display. In a town shaped repeatedly by wind and water, the reasons survive in the form of things rather than in anybody's memory, and they can still be read off a wall by a person who has never been told any of this.