The street of a post town turns into a farming village partway along. Fukusumi sits on the Saikyō highway: gable-fronted townhouses stand along the road, and beyond them thatched farmhouses and fields open out. The two are continuous — there is no gate, no boundary marker, nothing announcing the change — so walking the road means watching the character of the buildings alter gradually under your feet.

The post-town half is built for trade, with narrow frontages pressed together against the road and nothing wasted on either side of them. The farming half has larger roofs and considerably more room around each house, because a farmstead needs yard space and a shop does not. Sasayama's centre is about twenty minutes away by car and Osaka an hour and a half by expressway, and there are several cases here of empty houses being repaired and lived in again — which is worth noting, because it is not what usually happens in districts of this size and this distance from a city.

Having two origins inside one district means that conservation cannot be applied uniformly to it. A post town is a settlement organised around a road; a farming village is organised around its fields; and because they face different things, the spacing of the houses and their distance from the road differ throughout. At Fukusumi that difference is compressed into a few hundred metres of a single street. The places where a boundary is hard to locate are usually the places where you can see most clearly how a settlement came to exist at all, because nothing has been tidied up to make the story easier to tell.