Shirakawa-go

The upper Shokawa valley was settled late and lived apart. Steep forest, a fast river and snow that closed the passes for months made farming marginal, and the villages depended on what could be produced indoors. From the Edo period the farmhouse attics were used to raise silkworms, while the ground beneath the floor of the house was where saltpetre for gunpowder was made, leached from the earth under the hearth and sold out of the valley along with silk and paper. The great houses were built for that mixed economy, with three or four working storeys under one huge roof.

Their form, gassho-zukuri, named for the steep pitch that suggests hands joined in prayer, was a practical answer to snow: a rafter frame tied with rope and straw rather than nails, so that it flexes, and a thatch several tens of centimetres thick renewed by teams of villagers under a mutual-help system called yui. Households were unusually large, sometimes several dozen people, because land was scarce and holdings were kept undivided.

Silk collapsed and saltpetre became obsolete, and in the post-war decades many houses were pulled down or sold, while dam building on the Shokawa flooded villages upstream — some of their farmhouses were moved to the open-air museum across the river. A local preservation movement took hold from the 1970s, road tunnels ended the valley's isolation, and in 1995 the villages of Ogimachi, Ainokura and Suganuma were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage list. Tourism has been the valley's livelihood ever since.

Shirakawa-go's culture is the culture of a snow village: shared labour, thrift and a strong parish life. Yui, the system by which neighbours re-thatch each other's roofs in turn, still operates and is the clearest surviving expression of it; a re-roofing draws dozens of people and takes a single long day.

The village's own festival, held in October at its shrines, centres on doburoku, an unfiltered cloudy rice brew made under an old dispensation that allows shrines here to produce it. Sake is offered to the deity and then shared with everyone present, alongside lion dances and the folk songs of the valley. Kokiriko, the old dance of neighbouring Gokayama performed with a clapper of wooden slats, is the best known music of the region.

Buddhism here is Jodo Shinshu, the dominant school along the Sea of Japan side of the mountains, and the temple stands in the middle of the village rather than apart from it. Households keep a hearth, the irori, burning to dry the thatch from within — the smoke preserves the ropes and timbers — and the smell of that smoke is part of the place.

The present tension is between a heritage site and a home. Residents farm, run inns and shops and raise children in houses that great numbers of visitors walk past every year. The village asks visitors to stay on paths, keep out of private ground and photograph buildings rather than people.

About 1,600 people live in the municipality of Shirakawa, a few hundred of them in Ogimachi itself, and the number has been falling for decades. Most residents live in the outer hamlets along the river rather than in the listed village, and many of the working-age households depend on tourism — inns, car parks, cafés, shops and the buses.

Outside tourism the valley lives on forestry, small-scale rice and vegetable farming, and hydroelectricity: the dams on the Shokawa are a significant employer and the reason several upstream settlements no longer exist. Winter reshapes everything. Snow is cleared from roofs before it can crush them, roads run between white walls, schools and clinics are small and consolidated, and older residents time their shopping around the weather.

The day in Ogimachi has a sharp rhythm. Coaches arrive from mid-morning, the lanes fill until the middle of the afternoon, and by evening the village is almost empty except for the few farmhouse guests. Shops and restaurants close early because of it. The issues residents raise are the ones common to famous small places: the cost and skill shortage in re-thatching, fire risk, traffic and parking, a shrinking school roll, and how much of a visitor economy a village of this size can carry.

Mountain food, salted and preserved, underlies everything. Sansai, the wild greens and shoots gathered on the slopes in spring, appear boiled, pickled and in tempura; river fish, above all the ayu and iwana of the Shokawa, are grilled whole on skewers over charcoal with salt; and the winter table turns to miso, pickled vegetables and stews.

The dish most associated with the valley and the wider Hida district is hoba miso, sweet miso with mushrooms and spring onion grilled on a dried magnolia leaf. Gohei mochi, pounded rice pressed on a flat skewer, grilled and painted with a walnut, sesame or soy miso sauce, is sold from stalls and eaten standing. Soba, buckwheat noodles, is the everyday grain of the mountains, and Hida beef from the district to the east appears grilled on skewers, in buns and in set meals.

Doburoku is the local drink, a thick, sweet-sour unfiltered brew of rice that is cloudy white and lightly fizzing. The shrines hold an old right to make it for the October festival, when it is poured for everyone at the shrine, and bottled versions, sweets and ice cream flavoured with it are sold in the village.

Meals in a farmhouse inn are the fullest version of this food: a tray of small dishes around the hearth, with grilled fish, mountain vegetables, tofu, miso soup and rice from the valley's own paddies.