A person can’t visit Shirakawa-go for long without wondering what’s involved in maintaining those steep, thickly thatched roofs. The answer is: teamwork! Many hands make light work; the job takes only a few days when everyone pitches in. Here are two photographs, one much older than the other, of roof replacement on two of the largest houses.

We were fortunate to see work being done on another roof, on a much smaller scale, while we were there.

One man is gathering the straw into bundles; a second is raking the loose straw together and also handing the bundles up to the men working on the roof. The men on the roof are alternately feeling the roof thatch to make sure it is tight and solid, stuffing straw into the roof wherever they can to make it tighter, and shaving the edges of the newly stuffed straw into a neat line.

The other work in progress, it being mid-September, was the rice harvest. Rice, it turns out, is growing in many fields, large and small, throughout the village. It is surprisingly beautiful.

Scarecrows!

In a larger field, we saw one farmer using a hand-operated harvesting machine. In others, people harvested entirely by hand.

The sheaves are protected from the rain in their beautiful rows.