Count the windows and you can estimate how many worms the house held. Ōsugi is a settlement of three-storey sericulture farmhouses built into a slope, each one showing a horizontal run of windows along the rearing floors. A longer run means a larger rearing room, so the number of openings visible from outside gives a rough measure of the scale at which that household worked.

Ōsugi was designated an Important Preservation District in July 2017. The village road runs downhill toward the valley floor, and everything here is oriented by that fall: which houses get the morning sun, how far the walk back from the fields is, where the snow collects in February. There are a few dozen households; Yōka station is about thirty minutes away by car; and snow in winter makes a vehicle necessary rather than convenient. Sericulture ended, and the buildings stayed, so there are houses here occupied by families who are living with floors they no longer have any use for.

When an industry leaves, a house becomes too large. Heating it and cleaning it stop being manageable, and the usual response is to close the unused storeys off — which means that from the street nothing has changed while, inside, the occupied volume has shrunk to a fraction of what the building holds. That is the situation behind a good many of these facades, and there is no way to read it from the street. The rows of rearing-room windows remain an accurate and perfectly legible record of capacity — capacity that has not been called on for fifty years and will not be again.