Endangered Monuments

Kyoto's Traditional Houses
These traditional Japanese townhouses, or machiya, date as far back as the 1600s, when the ancient capital's merchants and craftspeople began using them as a place to live and work under a single roof. The houses, with their wooden latticework and traditional clay roof tiles, are difficult and costly to maintain; machiya are being torn down and replaced with new, modern homes and high-rise buildings at a rate of about 500 a year.

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