The shopfronts of the medicine merchants are still standing. Matsuyama in Uda was a district of wholesale pharmacies, and latticed townhouses with mushiko-mado run along the old highway through it. The plants used in the medicines grew in this area, so the people gathering the material and the people trading in it lived within the same few valleys, which is the arrangement that made the town possible in the first place.

Inside the medicine shops there are signboards and banks of small drawers, and the fineness of that cabinetwork is a direct expression of how finely the goods were divided — a trade dealing in grams needs a different kind of furniture from one dealing in bales. Matsuyama was designated an Important Preservation District in July 2006, and a sake brewery still trades on the street as an ordinary business rather than as part of the display. Haibara station is about fifteen minutes away by car, Osaka an hour and a half by Kintetsu, and the elevation here makes the winters genuinely cold.

Medicine is a product of small volume and high value. Selling something light at a high price means the arithmetic of carrying it a long way still works, which is how a town in the mountains came to serve a market far larger than its own district. The size of the merchant houses in Matsuyama has nothing at all to do with the weight of what passed through them. It is a function of margin, and margin is the one thing that a bad road cannot take away from a merchant. Everything else about this location was a disadvantage, and the trade was chosen accordingly.