There are Western-style buildings wedged in among the latticed townhouses. The Chirimen Kaidō in Kaya is a street of weaving houses and merchants who dealt in Tango chirimen, and standing among the traditional frontages are a Western-style clinic and the former town office. Chirimen is woven from yarn given a hard twist; passing the finished cloth through water shrinks it and produces the crêped surface the fabric is known for.

The weavers gathered here because the conditions suited them — water, and a humidity that made the yarn manageable — so the Tango climate is part of the explanation for why an industry of this size grew in a place of this size. Kaya was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2005, and textile plants still operate in the surrounding area. Miyazu and Fukuchiyama are each forty minutes to an hour away by car, and for a street of this length the variety of building types standing along it is genuinely unusual — a weaving shed, a clinic, a merchant house, an office, within a hundred metres.

Western-style buildings appearing in a street like this are the mark of a period when the district was making money. Putting up a clinic or a town office in a new manner requires both funds and a certain confidence about the future, so the changes in style along the road are dated evidence of when the town felt each of those. Read in order along the street, the frontages amount to a chronology of the industry. Lattice, then brick and stucco where a good decade fell, then lattice again further along, where the money ran out before the fashion for it did.