The walls are not white but an ochre, the colour of earth. Yōkaichi-Gokoku in Uchiko was built on mokurō, vegetable wax, and its houses run along a gentle slope finished in that yellowish plaster rather than the white of most preserved districts. Mokurō is pressed from the berries of the haze tree and used to make Japanese candles; in the Meiji period it was exported, and the scale of the houses here reflects what that trade was worth.

At the candle shop on the street you can watch the wax being built up: melted wax applied to the wick by hand, layer on layer, until the candle reaches its thickness. Uchiko was designated an Important Preservation District in April 1982. Matsuyama is about fifty minutes away by car, and there is both work on the empty townhouses and an established route into farming here. The application of the wax is judged by hand temperature rather than by instrument, which makes it one of those processes where the tool that matters is the worker.

Paraffin candles arrived and the wax trade thinned out quickly. Japanese candles survived anyway, because candles burned at a family altar or in a shrine are judged on different criteria — how much soot they throw, how the flame moves in still air — and on those criteria the vegetable wax product was not replaced. Demand fell to a small fraction of what it had been, and most of the wax trade closed. The reason it did not fall to zero lies in the use rather than in any sentiment about the craft, which is generally how a small trade survives a large one arriving.