Shirakawa-go

Shirakawa-go is an old-style Japanese village in the mountains to the east of Kanazawa.  Various international organizations that monitor and certify such things (namely UNESCO) say that it is really super, and a lot of tourists from both inside and outside Japan visit.  This August gave us plenty of time to do a lot of things we'd been meaning to, and Shirakawa-go was on the list.  An easy day-trip from home via bus from the station, we booked tickets to arrive mid-morning and depart mid-afternoon, on the feeling that no matter how historical, buildings are rarely so engaging that four or five hours of looking at them is less than satisfactory.

 Shirakawa-go is definitely amidst mountains.  While the primary attraction is a number of 200-year-old thatched roof houses of a construction style unique to the area, the the landscape and informal gardens are also quite pretty.

 Being engineers, we spent a lot of time trying to figure out exactly how the thatch is attached in addition to appreciating the buildings' aesthetic virtue.

 The rice up there is not as ripe as ours down on the coastal plain but rice in rice paddies was much in evidence.

 In one section of town, some more modern houses are present.  Most of the houses are actually lived in, except for the museum area off to one side.  Still looks mighty nice though.  The many producing gardens next to houses is extremely common in suburban and rural Japan, though in Shirakawa-go they seem to feature more flowers than usual.

 Some of the aquaculture areas (at least I think they're for aquaculture - some ponds had what appeared to be troutish fish rather than the decorative carp) had some very nice water lilies.

 Scenic overlook over the the town.  Ana in full yarn-trooper mode.

 The guy who took this picture knew my camera better than I do, and I watched as he switched it into one of the manual modes and started pressing buttons. 

 This is a rice planting machine, in one of the larger sizes that I've seen.  Rice seedlings in trays would be loaded onto it and it shoots them into the ground in rows.  This has to be waaaay faster than doing it by hand, which I've seen being done with some regularity around here.

 We paid to enter the museum area of the town, where the houses tended to be older and kept closer to original condition.  They are also quite large, some of them could be entered.

 I got a good look at the inside structure of the roof.  Apparently, snow is a serious problem up there - it looks like this thing could get hit by a meteor and walk it off.

 The upper floors of these large houses were originally used for growing and harvesting silkworms, increasing household income and presumably giving them things to do during the winter.

 Ana was quite pleased not to fall in.  That bridge is on the "Usual Route" of the tour that most people would be expected to follow.

 Definitely pretty enough to justify heading out there for an afternoon, at least if you live in Kanazawa to begin with.

This insect landed on Ana as were leaving, and was perhaps not as fearsome as she initially feared.

The four hours or so that we budgeted for seeing the town proved to be about perfect for us - we skipped some things that we weren't that interested in, and saw or did pretty much everything we wanted to there.  We had enough time at the end to grab a snack and eat it before the bus back to Kanazawa was ready to go.  See the rest of the pictures on Flickr.  It was early enough when we got back that we had time for some additional souvenir shopping in Kanazawa. What did we buy? Stay tuned to find out!