The bathhouse and the theatre are on the same road. Yamaga grew up along the Buzen Kaidō as a market town, and the street still carries plastered storehouses with their distinctive latticed walls, and among them stands the Yachiyoza, a wooden playhouse that has survived more or less intact. You can go behind the stage — under the walkway, down into the trap machinery, into the space where the revolve is turned by hand — which is unusual and worth the detour entirely on its own. On a day with no performance the auditorium is silent, and the only thing that seems alive is the colour of the painted advertisements running in rows across the ceiling. Those advertisements were how the building was paid for, which is a piece of economics you can read from the floor. Hot spring water rises in the same town, and standing between the two you begin to see why a theatre made commercial sense in a place this size.

Kumamoto is about fifty minutes away by car, and the town centre has a hospital and the ordinary shops. Nothing about the place is grand, and it does not try to be, which is part of why the theatre still feels like a working building.

A town with two separate reasons for people to arrive can survive one of them weakening for a while. That is the quiet advantage here, and it has been tested more than once over the last century. The Yachiyoza was built by local merchants who each bought a share, which is why the advertisements are on the ceiling and why the building belonged to the town rather than to a company. It was nearly lost and was restored by subscription. Lantern dancing fills these streets in August. It is the sort of resilience that only becomes visible across decades.