KATRINA LOBLEY

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Snow bleaches the scene monochrome. It’s like someone has shaken a feather quilt over the alpine village, smudging and blurring its edges. Yet the extraordinary feature of this remote community deep within the Northern Japan Alps – the reason 1.7 million visitors went there last year – remains visible from a nearby lookout.

Shirakawa-go isn’t the only Japanese village with gassho-style farmhouses – traditional thatch houses built on a superhuman scale to withstand extreme snowfall – but with 114 of them it has the country’s biggest and most famous collection. The farmhouses are such a fragile architectural wonder that the village was World Heritage-listed in 1995.

The houses have steep roofs shaped like praying hands – gassho means ”to pray”. At Shiroyama viewpoint, a gentle 20-minute hike from the village, tourists pose for photos with the houses behind them in the valley.

Down in the village, snow is piled shoulder high. The snow pack can reach up to three metres in winter, making Shirakawa-go one of Japan’s snowiest places. At ground level, visitors trotting about on distant ploughed paths are reduced to bobbing heads. The village also attracts plenty of photographers who stake their spots with tripods to capture their favourite gassho house in the changing light.

Like any half-decent supermodel, Shirakawa-go is photogenic no matter what the season. In spring, you could be fortunate enough to catch the sight of hundreds of villagers crawling over a gassho roof like a colony of ants (each house’s metre-thick thatch is replaced in a communal working bee every 30 to 40 years).

In summer, the houses are serenely reflected in flooded rice fields. In autumn, during the annual fire drill, they’re sprayed by giant water cannon tucked away in tiny gassho-shaped shelters. And in winter, the frosted roofs are illuminated on weekends throughout January and February in what’s known as ”light-up”.

Winter is also a taste of how hard it is to live gassho-style. We stop at Myozenji Temple’s five-storey living quarters, which once housed 40 to 50 people but now features displays illustrating how the upper storeys of these houses were traditionally used to raise silkworms.

Today, three people – the priest, his wife and their child – call the place home. The interior is unrelentingly black. Smoke from the ground-floor kitchen fire filters up through lattice ceilings to stain and preserve the thatch and rope-bound timbers (no nails are used to build these houses).

In socks we slip-slide down the staircase and through a chilly corridor into the freezer of a temple. With no heating and the temperature outside close to zero degrees, there’s no enticement to linger and we gallop back to the fire to thaw our near-frozen toes. The guide points out a bedroom peephole overlooking the fire – a constant vigil is required to keep this house warm.

”Living in these houses is not easy,” he says. I contemplate a wall clock’s face, once white, now tanned deep mahogany, and wonder what all the smoke does to the residents’ lungs.

By all accounts, gassho residents are proud and hardy characters. ”You become stronger in the cold,” the guide says.

There have been concessions to the 21st century: the toilet was once outside, far from the Buddhist altar, but it’s now indoors with the ubiquitous heated seat. Gassho houses are also high-maintenance, with the bills to prove it, but Gifu Prefecture helps alleviate these costs.

Landlocked Gifu lies north of Nagoya, in the heart of Japan. The prefecture is all flood plains in the south, rising to 3000-metre peaks in the north. Some visitors head here in winter with just two things on their mind: skiing (Gifu boasts 39 ski resorts) followed by a good old broiling in an onsen (hot springs).

Yet, away from the slopes, deep snow is no impediment to tourism. In fact, many places have hit on clever ways to turn the white stuff into a major drawcard. A snowman festival at tiny Shiramine at the base of Mount Haku – one of Japan’s Three Holy Mountains – in neighbouring Ishikawa Prefecture taps into the Japanese love of all things cute. Coachloads of camera-toting tourists flock in February to not only admire the 2000 illuminated snowmen patted into shape outside every shopfront but to warm themselves with local delicacies such as wild boar soup.

The weather frustrates us only occasionally. We head to the Hirayu Frozen Waterfall Festival in Gifu, not knowing heavy fog is obscuring the 64-metre-high, six-metre-wide sheet of illuminated ice. Oh well. Back to the hotel and some warm sake.

Sometimes, though, there are glorious moments that hark back to ancient times – to a Japan almost entirely lost – which can only be experienced in winter. A few kilometres outside Hida-Furukawa, in Kawai Town, we find Tadao Shimizu dressed in his all-weather gear.

The wizened artisan, 72, makes paper for stationery, lanterns and sliding-door screens. It’s not just any paper. As other paper-makers have done around here for 800 years, he uses a snow-bleaching technique known as yuki zarashi.

For more than half a century, Shimizu has followed a cycle dictated by nature: he grows kozo (paper mulberry trees) a kilometre away, strips the bark from the timber and lays out the fibrous centres in the snow for up to a fortnight from January through March. He marks the rows with long slender sticks. Up to half a metre of snow can fall here overnight and it wouldn’t do at all to lose your kozo in the snow.

The bleached fibres are boiled and decanted into a vat along with a dollop of natural glue. Shimizu stands on a grate – coals underneath warm his bones in the cold studio – and dips a screen, swirls and agitates the pulpy liquid, rotates and flops out a sheet of wet paper, counting it off on his abacus. He does this 200 times a day.

This sanchu paper – sanchu means ”deep in the mountains” – was so highly regarded in the 15th century that a single sheet would be given as a prize to sporting champions. From a peak of 100 paper-making houses in the area, just two remain today.

Shimizu is proud of his ancient craft but there’s every chance he’ll be the last papermaker in this house. His son, he confesses, isn’t interested in taking over and no other successor is apparent.

Katrina Lobley travelled courtesy of Gifu and Ishikawa prefectures and the Japan National Tourism Organisation.

FAST FACTS

Getting there

Air New Zealand flies seven direct services each week from Auckland to Tokyo, with economy fares from $2151 per person return, and five direct services to Osaka, with economy fares from $2153 per person return.  You can then take a bullet train to Nagoya, transfer to a standard train to Takayama and take a bus to Shirakawa-go.

Staying there

Hotakaso Yamano Hotel is a mountain resort hotel with Western- and Japanese-style rooms, a sprawling outdoor onsen with views of some of the highest peaks in the Northern Alps and a hot footbath in the foyer. The hotel is a five-minute drive from Hirayu Waterfall, one hour from Hida-Furukawa and 2½ hours from Shirakawa-go. It costs from ¥14,325 ($225) a person, including breakfast and dinner. It is located in Shin-Hotaka Onsen, one of five spas collectively known as Okuhida Spa Resort in north-eastern Gifu.

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