Shirakawa-go: roofs built like hands in prayer

Gassho-zukuri means built like hands pressed together in prayer, and once you see the roofs the name stops being poetic and becomes a description. In the Shogawa valley the snow can pile up several metres deep, so the farmhouses here were framed with thatch at a sixty-degree pitch to shed it, no nails anywhere in the structure, and rebuilt roof by roof — a job so large that the whole village turned out for each one, a tradition called yui. Some of these houses are 250 years old and still lived in.

Ogimachi, the largest hamlet, holds about a hundred of them along the river, and it was listed by UNESCO in 1995 together with Ainokura and Suganuma over in Gokayama. The upper floors, once used for raising silkworms under the warm apex of the roof, are open in a few houses — the Wada family home and the Kanda house among them — and the smell of the irori hearth smoke that cures the timber is part of the visit. From the Shiroyama viewpoint above the village the whole basin lines up: paddies, roofs, and the mountains closing it off.

The valley changes completely with the season. Rice paddies mirror the roofs in June; the surrounding beech forest turns in late October; and in January and February the deep snow arrives, with a handful of evenings each winter when the village is floodlit. It is remote, and quiet again by five in the afternoon, once the day buses from Takayama and Kanazawa have left.