Miyama Kayabuki Village — Thatched-Roof Hamlet

Thirty-eight farmhouses with roofs made of miscanthus grass, some piled a meter thick. No power lines. The only sounds at 7:00 AM: a rooster, a stream running through the rice paddies, an 80-year-old man splitting firewood behind a house his grandfather built in 1890. Miyama exists in a state of aggressive preservation—nobody's allowed to build anything modern, install vinyl siding, or even paint their fence a non-traditional color.

The thatched roofs need replacing every 25 years. When one family's roof goes bad, the whole village shows up with bundles of kaya grass and works for three weeks straight. They call it yui—mutual aid, the kind of communal labor that died everywhere else when people moved to cities. Here it's still the only way to survive. The roofs cost ¥15 million to re-thatch. Nobody has that kind of money, so everyone trades labor. You help with my roof, I'll help with yours in 2047.

You can sleep in these farmhouses if you book a minshuku. Dinner is river fish grilled over the irori (a sunken charcoal hearth in the floor), wild vegetable tempura, miso soup with mushrooms the owner picked that morning, rice so good you'll understand why Japanese people are snobs about it. The old woman running the guesthouse speaks four words of English. You'll sleep on futons she's been airing out since 1983. The bathroom's shared. The walls are thin enough to hear neighboring guests snoring. It's perfect.