Shirakawa-go

This guide to Shirakawa-go, near Kanazawa, opens in the blackened attic of a farmhouse where families once raised silkworms three times a year, under a steeply pitched thatched roof built to shed meters of mountain snow. You'll hear why the gassho-zukuri shape was an engineering necessity rather than an aesthetic choice, oriented east to west to clear snow and hold heat for the silkworms below, and what happened to one household that got the loft's temperature wrong. That same thatch, though, is dangerously flammable, and the village has lived with that risk for centuries. Look for the pipes underfoot as you walk between the houses.