Sanjo-dori Hashimoto Shopping Street is located nearest to Sarusawa-ike Pond on Sanjo-dori Street, the approach to Kasuga Taisha Shrine. As there was once a small bridge over the flow of the Bodaigawa river on the south side of the town, the town came to be called “Hashimoto-cho” (literally, bridge-under.) Hashimoto-cho is located where the Heijō-kyo Higashi-rokubo-oji Street crosses Sanjo-oji Street, and from ancient times, it has been considered to be the center of Nara. There are three principal roads that cross the Nara Basin and run through it north-south when coming from Fujiwara-kyo to Heijō-kyo, and one of these three is called Kamitsu-michi Road. Kamitsu-michi Road goes past Naramachi and crosses Sanjo-dori Street located to the east of the current Hashimoto-cho. To the side of Sarusawa-ike Pond stands Uneme-jinja Shrine which enshrines the uneme, a maid-in-waiting who served the Imperial Court and drowned herself in the pond in the Nara Period. “Uneme-matsuri Festival” is held every year on the harvest moon, and at night, boats with Imperial Court Musicians float upon the pond, to console the uneme along with those from her native town of Koriyama in Fukushima Prefecture. In Hashimoto Shopping Street, there is the restored “Nara kilometer zero marker” and a message board site called a “kosatsu site.” Kosatsu were standing boards with laws and ordinations or notifications from the magistrate’s office posted upon them, and the one in Hashimoto-cho was particularly large, which used to be called the “fuda-no-tsuji.” The current kosatsu site was built by hand in 1984 by the locals, and while the original boards have been fully restored, there are also some new ones written in humorous ways. In the Meiji Period, Hashimoto-cho, where the kosatsu site is located, was designated as kilometer zero for various roadways within Nara prefecture, thus the “Nara kilometer zero marker” was installed in 1888. The original installation was about 20 meters to the west (at the entrance to the Mochiidono Center Gai,) however, it was moved to its current site and restored in order to make it more noticeable to visitors. As Hashimoto Shopping Street is close to Nara Park and Naramachi, many stores sell souvenirs. In accordance with its reputation as being the center of Nara, it is hard to ignore the Nanto Bank’s head office building, with its retro-modern appearance.