Photos

Hida Folk Village (Hida no Sato) is an open air museum exhibiting over 30 typical farmhouses and other traditional buildings from the Hida region, the mountainous district of Gifu Prefecture around Takayama. During our visit, local artisans were at work weaving silk fabric, doing needlepoint, and doing basket-weaving.

The museum's main attractions are a number of gassho-zukuri houses. The massive farmhouses with their steep, thatched roofs which look like praying hands ("gassho-zukuri") were moved to the musuem from the nearby Shirakawa-go region.

This large bronze bell would have been used to call villagers to prayer at a Buddhist temple. We stopped at the village on a cool and misty autumn morning. Green moss on the thatched roofs was particularly pretty in the morning sunlight.