The walls are built from stone that was never cut. Sakamoto is the temple town below Enryaku-ji, where the satobō — residences for monks — are gathered, and along its streets run retaining walls in the anōshū manner: natural stones fitted together without being dressed. Because none of the faces is flat, the stones interlock with one another rather than merely stacking, and walls built this way are said to be markedly harder to dislodge.

A satobō is where a monk lived after completing training on the mountain above, and a number of them are open to visitors, with the garden at the former Chikurin-in among the ones that can be seen. Sakamoto was designated an Important Preservation District in October 1997, and the walls are not confined to the temple precincts but run continuously along the public streets. JR Hieizan-Sakamoto station is close and Kyoto station is a little over twenty minutes away, so this is commuting territory for the Kyoto–Osaka–Kobe area, and the street of stone walls doubles as a route to school.

Building without cutting the stone is not the lazy option. Searching out pieces whose shapes will engage, and setting each one so that it locks against its neighbours, takes considerably longer than squaring blocks would — but a stone left rough keeps more corners than a split one, and corners are what stop a wall from moving. These walls have been standing for centuries without mortar of any kind holding them together. That is the return on all the time spent selecting stones, collected several hundred years after the selecting was finished and the people doing it had been forgotten.