As a city-dweller, I love spending time in villages, in the countryside, closer to the mountains, forests and lakes, even though there are times when I miss the kind of convenience and efficiency we take for granted in our everyday lives. Last Christmas, we travelled up the mountain roads before arriving at the viewpoint that offered a panorama of Shirakawa-go surrounded by the snow-capped mountains. Look at the neat rows of the traditional gassho-zukuri farmhouses (or often referred to by the Japanese, that the roofs are shaped like palms clasped together in prayer) as well as the plots of land beside them, where crops are grown for subsistence. Walking through this mountain village felt like we have time-travelled back into ancient and feudal Japan where we *might* meet the samurai who wielded the katana (and this always comes to my mind whenever I think about the samurai: they commit seppuku, or disembowelment in the spirit of honorable suicide especially after they have shamed themselves or have failed their masters who were their feudal lords). I still wish I can meet a samurai one day, though. As this particularly mountainous region receives an incredible amount of snow during winter, they feature very steep roofs with a thick layer of thatching to adapt to snow that exceeds 4 meters on average per year. So, you can probably imagine how Shirakawa-go would look like in winter! There is also a row of scarecrows featured just in front of the crops and one of them looked like this. I wonder how it will be like staying in one of these farmhouses in winter and meeting a host family who has kept to their tradition for decades.
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