Gokayama

Saturday, May 23, 2009, 9:11 PM

This morning we left Kanazawa at 8 AM, and headed to Gokayama, a small gassho-zukuri style farming area of houses that are easily 300 years old. We got into the village of Ainokura at around noon and checked into our inns. We are staying in a place that is like a bed and breakfast, so essentially it is someone’s home. It is a very old house with a steep, thatched roof, and it is incredibly comfortable. The city is up in the mountains and it snows here during the winter, but today it was very hot and humid. The concept of seasons is still a little foreign to me, coming from California.

After we dropped off our stuff, we wandered around the village a little, taking pictures of the old houses and the rice paddies. At about 2, we took a bus to one of the other villages in the area called Suganuma. It was similar to the first with thatched roofs and a very old feel, but the site has become more of a tourist spot since the area was declared a world heritage site. There was an area with buildings that had been moved from other sites, but had the same style and feel. You can actually stay in those places if you want, but there are no meals included like there is at our inn. What was really interesting in Suganuma was a random modern museum near the old houses. It was the Style Museum of Gokayama, and it was built into the small hillside with walls of concrete and strange protruding rocks. It was really bizarre and totally out of place.

After that, we went to one of the most famous of these old houses. These houses had a pretty standard set up with two earthen floor rooms at the front of the house and then either two, or four raised rooms that were originally floored with planks of wood, but have now been replaced with tatami mats. There were two upper levels, the first accessed by stairs, the second by ladders. Some of the areas were structurally questionable, but it was nice because you could see the entire structure system of the house, which is unique because the members are tied together and kept in place that way. It is interesting because the upper triangle-shaped members come to a point and rest on the larger columns of the ground floor, creating a pin connection. When the roof is loaded with snow, the triangular members will shift without affecting the rest of the structure. This, in combination with the thatching of the roof being done in bundles, makes the building very easy to repair if one part of it were to fail.

The concept of thatching a roof is also really interesting to me because you are essentially keeping out water and holding up snow loads on dried grasses. The idea is that there are too many layers of thatch for the water to get through. Thatch is laid in bundles and is then tied to the roof structure in layers. In our town, the entire village gets together and re-roofs a house when it needs it. It only takes them one day to complete the process with all of them working together. It is amazing to me because this is a community and a system that has been in place for generations.

From the house, it was a half hour walk back to our inn. We were all a little tired, so we took a nap before dinner. At 6:30, dinner was served downstairs. Most of the meal looked very appetizing, but the main dish was a little intimidating. It was a fish…literally a whole fish, which had been skewered and cooked over the fire pit in the main room downstairs. You were meant to eat the fish…head, tail, bones and all. Now I do not like pork, and I only occasionally want beef, but poultry and fish I think are fair game. My reason for this has always been that I don’t like these creatures…I think they are ugly and so I will eat them so that I don’t have to look at them, plus they taste pretty good and don’t seem to have any other purpose really. This philosophy was definitely put to the test tonight. So when confronted by my dinner, I picked up that fish with my chopsticks, looked it in the gross little eyes and said “Alright fish, let’s do this.” Then I bit its head off.

It was crunchy and salty and really…not bad. I am not used to the whole idea of eating bone, but once you get past that whole thing, it was really good. The bones started getting a little intense for me down by the tail, so I just left the last little bit. The rest of the meal was pretty standard. We were served tofu with fish flakes, white rice, a bowl of vegetables with mushrooms and bean sprouts, some pickled things that I don’t really like, some sashimi with wasabi, vegetable tempura and soup with thin noodles, green onions and mushrooms in it. It was actually a lot of food, and on top of that, we shared a couple incredibly large bottles of biiru. It was fun, especially because Don is staying in our inn with our group (we had to break into two groups) and he’s always amusing. Plus it’s usually fun to drink with your teachers.

After dinner, we went up on the hill to try to get some night shots of the village with the houses all lit up. Unfortunately, my camera does not let me adjust the exposure time, so it’s not very good for night shots. I have messed with all the settings in vain, and have finally accepted that I will eventually need to drop a few hundred dollars on a camera that can actually take night shots. Oh well…I’ll just have to steal other people’s pictures since they have decent cameras.

Tomorrow we head back to Tokyo and I will hopefully catch up on some work. I’ll let you know how that goes.