Ōuchi-juku
Interesting facts
- The main street runs about 450 metres, and the protected district, including the shrine to Prince Mochihito, covers some 11 hectares.
- Isabella Bird stayed at an inn called Minoya during her 1878 journey through northern Japan.
- Each February, during the Snow Festival, snow lanterns are lit along the thatched street.
- A summer festival on 2 July honours Prince Mochihito; until 1873 it was held on the lunar anniversary of his death.
- Local tradition also places the grave of Sakuraki-hime, said to be the prince's consort, within the village.
- Ōuchi-juku was only the third former post town in Japan to be designated an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings.
- Visitor numbers exploded from about 24,000 in 1985 to more than a million a year by 2007.
- Because thatch burns so easily, every house has an automatic fire alarm and the street is guarded by 28 water cannons installed from 1991 onward.
- Residents revived the old custom of yui, communal unpaid labour, to rethatch roofs together as tin coverings were removed.
Why it is worth it
Ōuchi-juku is a single straight street in a small mountain basin of southern Aizu, lined on both sides by heavy thatched farmhouses that turn their gable ends to the road. The old highway runs for about 450 metres through rice fields at roughly 650 metres above sea level, ringed by forested peaks of the Ōu Mountains, and the effect — especially under deep winter snow — is of a village from the Edo period that never caught up with the railway age. The houses are hipped-roof minka of the region, and a water channel runs along both sides of the street.
The settlement became a post station around 1643 on the Aizu Nishi Kaidō, the road that linked the castle town of Aizu-Wakamatsu with Nikkō and, beyond it, Edo. It had an official inn for the domain lord and served his processions on the journey to the shogun's capital, as well as the rice convoys of Aizu; but the shogunate's restrictions on side roads and an earthquake in 1683 that blocked the highway further south diverted much traffic elsewhere, and Ōuchi settled into life as a half-farming, half-inn village. Local tradition links the place to Prince Mochihito, who rose against the Taira in 1180 and is said to have hidden here while fleeing north; a shrine in the village is dedicated to him. The traveller Isabella Bird lodged at one of its houses in 1878.
When a new road was built along the river valley in 1884 and railways reached Aizu at the end of the century, Ōuchi lost its purpose and slipped into quiet farming life. Electricity arrived only in 1946. During Japan's post-war boom many families covered their thatch with sheets of red and blue corrugated metal rather than rebuild, and residents initially turned down proposals for heritage protection. That cheap fix turned out to be the village's salvation: the old roofs survived underneath, and once the tin was stripped away and the thatch renewed, the historic street reappeared. In 1981 the post town and the area around its shrine were selected as a national Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings, and in 1984 the reconstructed lord's inn opened as a small museum of the townscape. The village is also known for its custom of eating soba noodles with a stalk of green onion in place of chopsticks.
Getting there
Ōuchi-juku lies in the town of Shimogō, Fukushima Prefecture, about 9 km from the centre of Aizu-Misato. Yunokami-Onsen station on the Aizu Railway is about 5 km away by prefectural road. Fukushima Airport (FKS) is about 52 km away in a straight line.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Ōuchi-juku was a small post station in Japan's Edo period and part of the Aizu Nishi Kaidō. It is now located in the town of Shimogō in Minamiaizu District, Fukushima Prefecture, and is famous for the numerous traditional thatched buildings from the Edo Period that line its main street.
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