The triangular house is triangular because the plot is. Shukunegi lies in the south of Sado, in a narrow valley where timber-walled houses stand shoulder to shoulder and stone-paved lanes thread between them. Ship's carpenters lived here, and the walls are built from ship planking with the joints closed the way a hull's are; on one corner, where two lanes meet at an angle, the house has simply taken the shape of the ground it was given. It was designated an Important Preservation District in April 1991, and people still live in it, with several of the houses open to visitors who want to see how the inside was arranged.

Ogi harbour is close by. Ryōtsu is an hour away by car, and serious medical care means the island's main hospital, which is the kind of distance that shapes how a household plans its week. The lanes are wide enough for two people to pass and no wider. On a windy day you understand the layout physically rather than intellectually: the gap between two houses is a windbreak, and the village has arranged itself so that there is never much gap to defend.

Having no spare land became the form of the place. If a house cannot grow outward, the skill available goes into how it is made instead, and here the available skill was shipbuilding — hence the plank joints, the wall cladding, the way water is shed. People call Shukunegi a shipwrights' village, which sounds like a description of an industry that once operated here. It is more literal than that. There was no yard; the houses themselves are built the way boats are.