Shirakawago Village

Damien and I just visited the mountain village of Shirakawago. This place is an UNESCO World Heritage Site that is in Gifu Prefecture where we live. It is famous for its huge thatched roof farmhouses called gassho-zukkuri. The name comes from the fact that their A-frame structure resembles two hands in prayer. These houses were all 100-250 years old and 3-5 stories tall. We were allowed to go into several that were either turned into museums. Each one had an irori (hearth with hanging pot) in the main room where you entered. This was for heating and cooking. The winters in Shirakawago see 2-3 meters of snow!

The upper levels were for cultivating silk worms. Although they don't do this anymore commercially, we were able to see some real silk worms eating leaves and you could actually hear them munching!!!

We were lucky enough to secure a reservation in one of the gassho-zukkuri that is open as an inn. It was run by a tiny little old lady bent at a 45 degree angle who spoke not a word of English. I think she and her husband are at the end of their careers as innkeepers. There weren't many other customers even though the rest of the inns in town were booked to capacity. I found this one by desperately calling around from a list I found on the internet. I can tell you it was a challenge to my limited Japanese to have been able to make the reservation! (Actually I had one of the staff at work call back a few days later and just confirm that I had really made one.) The place was quaint and the food was good. We did have a Giant Asian Hornets nest right outside our room, but they didn't bother us. The second night we were there, there was another guest. When the little old lady called us in for dinner we met him. He was an Iranian immigrant who had fled Iran 17 years ago because he was afraid he would get killed since he didn't believe in Islam. His English was limited so we mainly spoke in broken Japanese. He wanted to know if I like Obama or Clinton better! I said Clinton and he agreed. He asked the little old lady who was listening to us and she said that she didn't know about any of it and it didn't matter to her either way. The day we left we saw her leave the house and hobble down the road and out of sight. We wondered where she had gone and if she would get back before our bus left! She came back several minutes later and had bought us a little memento, a Hello Kitty chain for a cell phone with Hello Kitty dressed up as a gassho-zukkuri house! Cute!

For lunch one of the days we were there we ate in a gassho-zukkuri that was surrounded by ponds and gardens. Their speciality was trout and it was interesting that a guy kept coming out of the kitchen and walking outside to get live fish from their ponds. Talk about fresh!

The whole village was amazing and was quite different from anywhere else we have been in Japan. The conbination of beautiful mountains, a clear cool mountain river, giant old thatched roofs, and fresh local food made the place seem like a real shangra-la!