The lattices are red because the pigment was made here. Fukiya is a settlement strung along a single road on top of a mountain, its houses fronted with red-painted lattice under Sekishū tiles. The red is bengara, an iron-oxide pigment produced from ore raised alongside the copper, and selling it is what made this remote village prosperous enough to build the street you are looking at.

Fukiya was designated an Important Preservation District in May 1977. The old school building and the mouths of the mine workings are both within walking distance, so the industry and the town it paid for can be seen in one afternoon. Takahashi's town centre is about forty minutes away by car. The population is now in the low hundreds, and empty houses are being taken on as shops and places to stay, which is the usual pattern in villages of this size but rarely as visible as it is here, where every frontage is accounted for.

They painted their own houses with the product they were selling. Using the colour across the whole village turned the place into a sample card, and it also disposed of pigment that would otherwise have gone to waste — advertising and housekeeping settled in a single decision, which is about as economical as a decision gets. The roof tiles carry the same reddish cast as the lattice, so the settlement holds to one family of colour from end to end. A red road on top of a mountain is what that arrangement looks like a century and a half later, long after the last of the ore was raised and the customers stopped coming up the hill to buy.