Water runs audibly along the edge of the road. Kumagawa-juku was a post town on the route that carried salt and mackerel from Wakasa to Kyoto, and a channel called the Maekawa runs beside the highway through the village, so the row of townhouses is walked to the sound of moving water. It was designated an Important Preservation District in July 1996. In front of the houses you can still find the steps cut for drawing water and the stones that go down to a washing place.

The channel was not built for drinking water. It was for washing goods, for putting out fires and for clearing snow off the road, and it was installed as part of the infrastructure of the post town rather than added later as an amenity. Obama is twenty minutes away by car and Kyoto about an hour and a half; the population is in the hundreds, and the work is inns and primary industry. People call this the mackerel road, but fish is only the best-remembered cargo: everything the Wakasa coast sent to the capital came along this line, which is why a village this size has a street of that width.

Post towns were spaced at the distance a loaded person could walk in a day. Kumagawa is where it is not for the view but because someone leaving Obama in the morning arrived here in the evening, so the position of the village on the map is a measurement of a day's walking. That measurement has not changed, even though nobody now walks it. And the water that never stops running past the doors was there, among other things, to wash off exactly that much tiredness.