A townhouse, a school and a church stand on the same street. Unomachi is a zaigōmachi — a country market town — on an old highway, with white-walled houses along it and, on the street frontages, hajitomi: shutters hinged at the top that lift upward. Raised during the day, a hajitomi becomes the counter a shop trades over; lowered at night, it is the door. One piece of joinery, two functions, no moving parts to speak of.

A Meiji-period school building and a church stand along the same street, so Edo townhouses and Western-influenced architecture from fifty years later survive side by side rather than in separate quarters. Unomachi was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2009. Uwajima is about thirty minutes away by car, and there is a station on the Yosan line, so people commute from here. The school and the church are in the town at all because this place functioned as the centre for the farming villages around it.

A zaigōmachi is neither a castle town nor a post town. It formed on its own, at the point where people and produce from the surrounding countryside converged, which means there is no trace of anyone having planned it: the width of the street and the arrangement of the houses were settled by use, adjusted over time. When an institution had to be built for a whole district — a school, later a church — it went where the most people already were on an ordinary weekday. That is how a country market town with no lord and no post station ends up holding the school, and why all three kinds of building are on one street.