Field notes from Senboku, where the index begins.

Senboku-shi is what the municipal mergers of 2005 made of three towns — Kakunodate, Tazawako, and Nishiki — and the seams still show, usefully. Kakunodate keeps the samurai district and the tourism; Tazawako keeps the lake and the ski hill; the rural wards between them keep the houses nobody is watching.

The bank inventory here runs deeper than the website suggests. The published list holds a few dozen properties; the town office's paper file holds more, and the officers will walk you through it if you arrive with a translator and an appointment. Two of the best houses we saw in ten days were in the file, not on the site.

Prices are honest single digits. A sound six-room farmhouse with mains water and a two-kilometre run to the Tazawako lifts listed at ¥2.8m; a Kakunodate machiya needing a roof came in under one. The renovation economy is the constraint — there are three carpentry firms serving the whole city, and the good one is booked until spring.

What Senboku does not have is an English-speaking services layer, and the town is refreshingly clear that it is not building one. What it has instead is patience: officers who answer a second email, neighbours who wave at the viewing, a ski hill that queues politely at New Year and not otherwise.

The index's Senboku rows are being assembled now, entry by entry, with the original Japanese attached to each translation. When they publish, this journal will walk through three of them in detail — one to buy, one to negotiate, one to walk away from, and the reasoning on each.