Shirakawa-gō

Shirakawa is a mountain village in the far north of Gifu Prefecture, where the Shō River cuts a narrow valley between forested ridges below Mount Hakusan. Almost all of its 356 square kilometres is steep woodland, and winters bring snowfall that adds up to more than ten metres in an average year. That snow explains the look of the place: the farmhouses of Ogimachi, the largest hamlet, carry enormous thatched roofs pitched so steeply that they meet at the top like two palms pressed together — the origin of the name gasshō-zukuri, "built like hands in prayer".

Ogimachi keeps 59 of these houses, most of them raised between the end of the Edo period and the late Meiji era. They were never simply dwellings. The tall attics, stacked in several floors under the thatch, were given over to raising silkworms, while the ground beneath the floorboards was used to make nitre, a raw ingredient of gunpowder — two trades that let an isolated valley with little flat land earn a living. Re-thatching a roof is too big a job for one family, so it has long been done by the whole community under a system of mutual help called yui; a roof lasts roughly thirty to forty years before it needs renewing.

In 1995 the villages of Shirakawa-gō and neighbouring Gokayama were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List. What makes Ogimachi memorable is the ensemble: dark timber and grey-brown thatch scattered among small fields along the valley floor, with the forested slopes rising straight behind. The view from the Shiroyama observatory on the old castle site shows the whole pattern at once, and a suspension bridge over the Shō leads into the village from the river side. Several houses are open inside — the Wada, Kanda and Nagase houses among them — and the Gasshō-zukuri Minkaen gathers relocated farmhouses into an open-air museum. On selected winter weekends the village is lit up after dark, when snow lies heavy on the roofs. Each October the Shirakawa Hachiman Shrine holds the Doburoku festival, named after the cloudy, unfiltered sake brewed for it.

Getting there

Ogimachi lies about 27 km from Nanto, the Toyama Prefecture city that includes the Gokayama villages further down the same river. The nearest airport is Toyama Kitokito Airport (TOY), about 49 km away. The Tōkai-Hokuriku Expressway (E41) passes the village, and Nōhi Bus runs a line linking Takayama, Shirakawa-gō, Kanazawa and Toyama/Takaoka; from the Takayama bus centre the ride takes about 50 minutes.