Japan
Ouchi-juku
Thatched-roof inns lining a mountain highway frozen since the samurai stopped passing through.
The main street is unpaved by design. Ōuchi-juku is a thatched post town in Japan's Fukushima Prefecture where the road is still bare earth, edged with running water channels and lined with buildings that served Edo-period travellers walking the Aizu road between Aizu-Wakamatsu and Nikkō. The thatching is fresh — it is replaced by hand on a rota. Everything else has been here since the Edo period.
Ōuchi-juku was a station on the Aizu Nishi Kaidō, its buildings serving samurai, merchants and pilgrims as inns, shops and restaurants. Many were kept as they were before the Meiji Restoration, and the whole street is now a national preservation district in which the steep thatched roofs, built for the region's snow, cannot be replaced with anything modern. The signature dish is negi soba — cold buckwheat noodles eaten with a single long spring onion that serves as chopstick and condiment at once. In winter the snow buries the roofs to the eaves, and on a February weekend the village lights the street with candles for its snow festival.
Couple
The village in winter snow — candle-lit, silent, blanketed white — is among the most photographed sights in Japan. Come for the February festival if you can.
Family
Children can try eating negi soba with a spring onion for a chopstick, explore the water channels, and climb to the hillside viewpoint that shows the whole street at once.
- A thatched post town where the main street is unpaved and edged with clear running water channels.
- Negi soba — buckwheat noodles eaten with a single long spring onion as both chopstick and condiment.
- The roofs are still thatched by hand, and nothing modern may replace them under the town's preservation rules.
- Snow buries the thatched roofs to the eaves in winter and turns the village into a woodblock print.
Negi soba — cold buckwheat noodles eaten with a raw spring onion as your only utensil.
Grilled dango rice dumplings slathered in sweet miso at every second doorstep.
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