Edo

At Horikawaya Nomura in Gobo, Wakayama, this workshop presses soy sauce mash and heats it over a wood fire. Its brick chimney marks a brewery registered in 2014.

The First Brewing House at Horikawaya Nomura is a late-Edo store where soy sauce mash matures. Koji mould clings even to the timber here. Registered in 2014.

The Shop and Main House at Horikawaya Nomura is a late-Edo townhouse on Gobo's Shinmachi street, its timber stained red with bengara. It alone is open to visitors.

The storehouse at Horikawaya Nomura is a late-Edo, two-storey dozo near the brewery's heart, its thick walls guarding tools from fire and damp. Registered in 2014.

The Matabei Residence Main House is a late-Edo townhouse in Gobo's temple town, its eaves bearing a local fascia, odare. It frames the lane behind the Betsuin.

The Misoya Bekkan Shimogura in Hashimoto City, Wakayama, is a traditional Japanese earthen storehouse built in 1808 during the late Edo period. Registered as a National Tangible Cultural Property, this rare surviving merchant-family kura stands at the heart of the former post town that prospered along the pilgrimage route to Mt. Koya, offering visitors a quiet glimpse of two centuries of Japanese commercial heritage.

The main house of the Yamamoto merchant firm in Kainan, Wakayama: a late-Edo living wing crowned in 1906 by a three-storey reception block with a railed veranda.

A tall four-legged gate of the mid-Edo period stands before the Important Cultural Property main hall of Risho-Gokoku-ji, the temple locals call the Great Temple.

Cut from local rhyolite in the late Edo period, these steps and wall hold Ryogon-ji to its mountainside and frame the main hall. A Registered Cultural Property.

Built in 1857, this Rinzai Zen main hall stands plain on a stone terrace above Ono hamlet, without canopy or brackets, its strength lying in sturdy joinery.

An Important Cultural Property at Sainanin on Mt. Kōya, showing the guardian deity Daigensui Myōō. The Agency for Cultural Affairs records it as a Yuan Chinese work.

An Important Cultural Property at Kongobuji, from Yuan-dynasty China. Tradition calls it Yakushi, the Medicine Buddha, but its official title names only a buddha.

Ten sliding-door panels by Ike no Taiga (1723–1776), a founding master of Japanese literati painting, preserved at Henjōkōin temple on sacred Mount Kōya in Wakayama. Designated a National Treasure of Japan in 1952, the set includes the celebrated Sansei gakai-zu — Elegant Gathering at the Mountain Pavilion — and stands as one of only three Taiga works ever to receive Japan's highest cultural designation, surviving in the prestigious sub-temple for which it was originally painted.