The inns face each other across the river. Ginzan Onsen is built along both banks of a narrow stream, and the wooden inns that line it — three and four storeys, put up in the Taisho period — turn their fronts to the water. The road is narrow, the river is narrower, and the windows opposite are close enough that you could hold a conversation across them without raising your voice. In the evening the gas lamps are lit, and the sound arrives before the light does: wooden sandals on the stone paving, people who have just come out of the bath and are in no hurry to be anywhere else.

Multi-storey timber building of this kind is difficult to do well and was largely abandoned everywhere else. That it survives here in a row has less to do with intention than with arithmetic: the reason to rebuild and the money to rebuild never arrived in the same decade. Obanazawa's town centre is thirty minutes away by car, which is far enough that this row is not a suburb of anything. Work here means the inns, and the snow in winter comes deep enough to change the shape of the street for months at a time.

Not modernising has become the asset. It is worth saying that this was not a decision anyone made; what survived was later given a name and a value, which is the usual order of these things. The row still rests on the ordinary daily work of keeping inns open, and the lamps are lit every evening by somebody whose job it is to light them, which is less romantic than the photographs suggest and a good deal more durable than romance.