Ogimachi Village (Shirakawa-go)

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About Ogimachi Village (Shirakawa-go)

Ogimachi is the largest historic village of Shirakawa, in the Sho River valley. It brings together some dozens of gassho-zukuri houses, surrounded by rice fields, vegetable plots, storehouses and irrigation channels. Together with the villages of Ainokura and Suganuma in Gokayama, it was inscribed in 1995 as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as the Historic Villages of Shirakawa-go and Gokayama.

The name gassho-zukuri comes from the roof’s shape, which resembles hands joined in prayer. The thick thatch and steep pitch are designed to shed snow, which can exceed 2 meters in winter. Inside, the houses have several floors beneath the roof: the ground floor, with the hearth in the earthen floor, was the living area; the upper floors were used for silkworm farming and saltpetre production for gunpowder, which provided income for the families.

The roofs are rebuilt every few decades by community work parties, the yui, which gather hundreds of residents and volunteers in a single day. In the village, some houses are open to visitors as museums, such as the Wada, Kanda and Nagase houses, and the open-air Gassho-zukuri Minkaen museum displays houses brought from other villages.

Many houses remain inhabited, and the village asks visitors not to enter private land, not to use drones and to keep quiet. On a few winter nights, the houses are illuminated, and access to the village then requires a reservation. Those who stay overnight usually have dinner seated on the floor around the irori.