The road turns at right angles, so you cannot see ahead. The samurai quarter of Obi is a run of stone bases topped with clipped hedges, and the road turns square corners as it works through the old castle town before continuing into the merchant streets. The main gate and the domain school survive, which makes it clear how compact the arrangement was: administration, education and residences all within a few minutes on foot.

Setting a hedge on top of a stone base does two jobs at once, breaking the wind and blocking the view in, and in this climate it was a more sensible answer than building the wall higher. Obi was designated an Important Preservation District in May 1977. Nichinan's town centre is about fifteen minutes away by car and Miyazaki city about an hour, so this is a district people live in rather than a site kept apart from the working town. The corners were cut into the street pattern for defensive reasons; the effect now is that the view changes at every turn, and people slow down without deciding to.

A hedge in a samurai quarter loses its shape unless it is cut every year. Stone stays where it is put, with or without attention, but the green half of this streetscape disappears the moment anyone stops maintaining it — so what survives here is held in place by an annual round of manual work rather than by durability. Roughly half of what a visitor photographs here is a standing crop rather than a structure. Somebody is still cutting it, this year and every year, and the town looks the way it does for no better reason than that they have not stopped doing so.