Gokayama

The road into Gokayama drops between valley walls so steep that for centuries the only reliable way out was upstream. That isolation shaped everything — the steep-roofed houses built like hands pressed in prayer, the tofu firm enough to carry on a rope, and the secret industry the feudal lords hid here under three metres of snow.

The villages of Ainokura and Suganuma in the Shō River valley of Toyama share UNESCO World Heritage status with neighbouring Shirakawa-gō for their gasshō-zukuri farmhouses — thatched roofs pitched steep enough to shed the region's colossal snowfall, built without nails, with attics that once raised silkworms — some of them more than 250 years old. Gokayama's villages are smaller and quieter than the famous one over the border, still working communities rather than museum pieces, and many of the farmhouses take guests: you sleep under the thatch and eat iwana char grilled on a stick at the sunken hearth. Their deepest secret was industrial — through the Edo period the Kaga lords quietly made saltpetre for gunpowder here, out of the shogunate's sight, and the folk museum tells it. Gokayama also keeps kokiriko, one of Japan's oldest folk dances, performed with clacking bamboo, and hand-made washi paper from mulberry bark.