Japan travel (Day 7-8): Shirakawago gassho-zukuri house

by ozchinita
(Dec 2-3, 2013)

After our walk around the village, we checked in to our accommodations for the night in a traditional farmhouse called the gassho-zukuri.

Since this is in the province area, the locals hardly speak english and they don’t have wifi or internet (you’re really living in a farm).. So if you want to make reservations, you will have to go through this website and choose from the list of farmhouses available there.  Other option we found was to email this address (info-e@shirakawa-go.gr.jp) to ask about other farmhouses that don’t show up in the earlier website.  If you want to get the cheapest price, you have to book early as there’s limited farmhouses and rooms available.

The prices range from 7000-10000 yen per night.  We wanted the cheaper ones but those were all fully booked already, so we ended up making reservations at Furusato which was 8900 yen per person per night.  The price typically includes meals for dinner and breakfast.

While waiting for dinner to be prepared, we waited inside our room and were provided some tea and crackers..

It’s a good thing I took photos of the crackers, because later on we tried to buy more and find it in the local shops in the village.  Since nobody can speak english, we just showed them the photo and they immediately knew what we wanted 🙂

Since we were a big group, we occupied two rooms, the sliding door was opened to combine it into 1 room.

The floor was lined with tatami mats and futons were spread out for each person to sleep in.

And if you need to change, there’s a divider setup here for that.

The toilet/bathroom is shared with everyone staying here, but it was manageable and it was clean.

area to wash hands & brush teeth.. Disposable toothbrushes provided

More pictures of the interior of the house

Robes were provided, with no internet or anything to entertain ourselves with, we just took heaps of photos..

The middle of the dining area had this open fireplace called irori used for heating and cooking.

Finally dinner was served!! The food was made of local ingredients and representative of the typical type of dishes they would eat here in the village.

This was the breakfast served the following day..

The host made hand gestures to show us how we were supposed to eat it

Before we left, got a picture with our hosts.