Itaibara Village

Itaibara is a small settlement in a fold of the mountains three kilometres north-east of Chizu, reached through a tunnel, and it looks the way rural Japan looked in about 1955. That is not a restoration — the village simply stopped changing. There is a thatched farmhouse, a row of timber houses more than fifty years old, a village hall from the early Showa period, a shrine, a water mill and a charcoal hut, all still standing in a valley with no through road.

Its origins are said to go back to the Heian period and the tradition is that it began as a refuge for Taira clan survivors. The prefecture designated it a traditional buildings preservation district in 2004. A handful of the old houses now operate as a café and an occasional restaurant serving food cooked on a wood stove with rice milled by the water wheel; the rest is simply a village where a small number of people live.