A shukubō is a house built to lodge pilgrims. Togakushi is the temple town below Togakushi Shrine, and along the cedar-lined approach stand shukubō roofed in thatch or in sheet copper, one after another. These were lodgings attached to the shrine, taking in people who had come to worship, and a number of them still operate as inns today, which is not true of most surviving pilgrimage accommodation.

Togakushi was designated an Important Preservation District in February 2017, and what the designation covers is a single continuous scene: the avenue of cedars and the line of lodging houses reading as one thing rather than as trees plus buildings. The village sits on a plateau at around twelve hundred metres. Buses take about an hour from central Nagano, and the winter snow is deep. Soba restaurants line the road partly for reasons of climate: it is cool here, the water is good, and rice was never easy to grow.

An inn at a shrine gate has a year with a shape. There is a season when pilgrims concentrate and a season when snow keeps everyone away, and the division between them is sharp rather than gradual, so a shukubō is set up in advance to run for certain months and to close for others. That rhythm has consequences for the buildings. Thatch survives here in part because there is a fixed stretch of every year when the house is not receiving guests at all, and the roof can be worked on without anybody losing income by closing. A building with no off-season is much harder to maintain than one with a long one.