Hidden in the hills, the Japanese villages where thatching lives on – Technologist

Kazumi Numaguchi takes a handful of grass and draws the bright steel of his sickle through the stems. Holding the plants near the ears, he shakes them, and a snaggle of broken stalks and weeds drift down to the ground. Now the grass is ready to be transported to the valley below, where next spring it will be thatched on to one of the roofs in Suganuma.

The village sits in a deep, wooded valley in Toyama Prefecture, only 140km north of the forest of skyscrapers in downtown Nagoya. Suganuma and the neighbouring hamlet of Ainokura are collectively referred to as Gokayama. Together, they offer a rare snapshot of pre-industrial Japanese rural life, and are defined above all by their remarkable collection of thatched houses. 

I am here with 20 or so people who have come to learn how the roofs are made. We make an unusual group. My interpreter Hiroe Toyohara, a volunteer at the Japan Thatching Cultural Association, the organiser of the workshop, is wearing flame-orange trousers, a purple fleece and a hat she knitted from her dog’s fur. There are young thatching apprentices in denim and streetwear, architects in boiler suits, and a young, chain-smoking artist who paints with natural clays. 

We collect a sickle each and begin to cut. I do so slowly, getting a feel for the unfamiliar tool and material. The Japanese name for this grass, kariyasu, means “easy to cut”, and that’s evidently the case for Junya, the apprentice thatcher I’m working beside. Later he confesses: he’s a former professional grass cutter, the workshop was really just an excuse for him to visit Gokayama to see its celebrated thatched houses.

Originally the gassho-zukuri were not cosy farmhouses, but more like small factories, producing silk and gunpowder for the area’s richest families. The wealth these industries generated allowed for the construction of exceptionally tall, imposing roofs: these are not just some of the crowning expressions of Japan’s 5,000-year-old thatching tradition, they are arguably some of the finest thatched buildings in the world. 

Like all vernacular buildings, their design has evolved through a centuries-long conversation with their surroundings. The materials they are built from — cedar, grass, rice straw and Japanese witch hazel — are cut within walking distance. They have been shaped by the elements: their roofs have an unusually steep pitch (up to 60 degrees) to help shed the three metres of snow that falls here each winter. To minimise the risk of storm damage, the houses are orientated so a gable end faces the prevailing weather. Suganuma sits in the bend of the Shō river — when you look at the settlement from across the valley, the angle of the houses perfectly follows its course, along which the wind blows.

After a few hours of cutting, we gather the grass into bundles, then rope them into bales. One of the thatchers drives a vehicle fitted with caterpillar tracks up the slope to collect them. The bales are then loaded on to a lorry using a mechanical grab designed for lifting timber, and it’s time to return to the hotel in the valley.

There I have an introduction to Japanese après-thatch. In the absence of a shower in my room, I am invited to gently poach myself in the onsen, or communal hot spring bath. Junya, the apprentice from the south, appears at my door in a dressing gown and leads me to the bathing room. In it are arranged a row of little plastic tubs, on which I am encouraged to perch and wash myself with a shower head. A row of politely nodding bathers are doing the same, all of us facing forwards into an unflinchingly full-length mirror. Then it’s off the plastic tubs and into the onsen itself, which is set outside among a jumble of smooth boulders.

Watching wisps of steam drift up into the starry night sky, and letting the Japanese conversation wash over me, I think back over the day’s cutting. As the heavy machinery used to collect the grass demonstrated, the roofers of Gokayama may be the keepers of an ancient craft, but they are no Luddites. 

The same is true of thatchers the world over. On a Danish island in the Baltic, I saw the only craftsman still plying the wonderfully obscure art of seagrass thatching. He used a 20-tonne crane to lift turf on to the roof to make the ridge. In the Scottish Western Isles, the world’s last full-time marram grass thatcher has no qualms about using a petrol-driven strimmer, not a traditional scythe, to cut his thatch.

Japanese thatching, too, is no stranger to progress. While women were once forbidden from even setting foot on the roof, they now make up a substantial proportion of new apprentices — as many as half, according to one thatcher I spoke to, Nishio Haruo. Haruo himself runs an Instagram account, @japanesethatchingguy, with more than 100,000 followers. Hiroe Toyohara — the Japan Cultural Thatching Association volunteer with the dog-hair hat — encourages university students to put down their phones and spend an afternoon cutting grass with her, and then learn how to tie it to the roof. The work is manual, communal, dirty.

“They are missing these things in their everyday lives,” says Toyohara. These students consider thatching baeru (Instagrammable) and even emoi — another Japanese neologism, used to describe a landscape or scene that prompts an emotional response.

It is a brave new existence for Japanese thatch which was once, above all, a roof of rural necessity. As late as the 1940s, thatch was still the standard covering on houses in the Japanese countryside, unlike in the UK, where it began to disappear with the arrival of industrialisation and the railways in the mid-19th century. 

The decline of Japanese thatching, when it came, was even swifter than Britain’s. Mass migration to the cities began in the 1950s and this, along with the rapid mechanisation of farming, led to an unravelling of the web of rural life into which thatching had been so closely woven. The speed of rural flight was witnessed by the American writer Alex Kerr. He described almost apocalyptic scenes when house-hunting in the Japanese countryside in the 1960s in his book Lost Japan: “On entering one of these houses, it looked as though the residents had simply disappeared . . . Everything was in place: the open newspaper, remains of fried eggs in the pan, discarded clothing and bedding, even the toothbrushes in the sink.”

About 25km south of Gokayama lies its more famous neighbour, Shirakawa-go. It’s a 35-minute drive today but, before asphalt and the combustion engine, it was a significant journey and so Shirakawa-go looks and feels different. It has 100 gassho-zukuri houses, compared with the 20 or so in Gokayama, and the houses here have sharp, angular gables, unlike the rounded edges of the smaller village. The setting, though, is broadly similar: a wide valley bottom hemmed in by thickly wooded mountains. 

Hiroe and I leave the car park with its rows of tour buses — a shock after sleepy Gokayama — and push our way through a forest of selfie sticks: Shirakawa-go is about as baeru as it gets. We continue past gift shops and house museums to where, outside the Buddhist temple, its priest is awaiting our arrival.

In his bare feet Oizumo Shingo can’t be more than 5ft tall, and his eyes are full of mischief. He has close-cropped hair, a long, wispy beard, and a tracksuit emblazoned with the words NEW YORK on the chest. 

“England? Ah, do you live near that place I know? What’s it called again? Stonehenge! You must live near there?”

Having located my home in Devon in relation to Stonehenge, and my native Scotland to both of those, I ask about the priest’s own background. Oizumo was born in the village, and like most people in Shirakawa-go has turned his hand to thatching from time to time. But, coming from a family of priests, his path was always clear. It must be an important job in the village, I begin, choosing my words carefully out of respect for the priest — the first I have spoken to in Japan. But as Hiroe translates the first words I quickly regret being so po-faced.

“Important? You think so?” Oizumo chuckles. “Nodani-san, did you hear that?” he turns to the thatcher who will show me around Shirakawa-go. “Apparently I am a very important man in this village!”

It’s time to talk thatching. I explain that I have come here partly to explore an old co-operative way of working called yui. Or what’s left of it. The yui system meant, in the simplest terms: I’ll thatch your roof if you thatch mine. It allowed the huge roofs of Gokayama and Shirakawa-go to be renewed in a single day, with up to 200 villagers working together: a small army of amateur thatchers. No money changed hands, but special tokens, or yui chou were used to record who had helped whom on which roof. The favour had to be returned. 

Today, Shirakawa-go is the only place in Japan where yui still exists. But now, it only takes place once every few years, when it is overseen by a team of hard-hat-wearing professional roofers. 

I put to the priest the obvious question: though yui was once vital in sustaining life here, hasn’t it now become a tourist spectacle? I mean, now that you have full-time thatchers, you don’t need to thatch with yui at all.

Oizumo adjusts his well-worn face mask and looks at me evenly. “Why keep yui going? I’ll tell you. Yui is our tradition.”

And, for all its enthusiasm for technology and industrial progress, Japan continues to hold tradition dear. Take the shrines at Ise Jingu, 85km south of Nagoya and one of Shinto’s holiest sites. They are rebuilt from scratch to identical specifications every 20 years, in a ceremony called the shikinen sengu that is reputed to have continued unbroken for two millennia. Unlike the monumental stone walls of a cathedral, Ise Jingu’s cypress and grass shrines exist in a constant cycle of repair and renewal, sustained by the landscape and communities they belong to. 

At the heart of the rebuilding ceremony at Ise Jingu is the Shinto idea of tokowaka, which is usually translated as everlasting youth. Ise Jingu’s shrines, the roofs of Gokayama and Shirakawa-go — the craft of thatching with its baeru-seeking acolytes — are not ancient or new, they are both.

Tom Allan is the author of “On The Roof: A Thatcher’s Journey”, to be published by Profile Books on August 29

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