Iide Town
Nakatsugawa Farmhouse Inns

In Nakatsugawa district, eight farmhouse-inns run their business making the most of each unique characteristic. The ladies who work at the inns play an important role of planning the menu, which is the “face” of each inn. We had a pleasure of talking with the energetic ladies who are born to treat people with their delicious meals.

Getting out of the margin

It was about ten years ago when the farmhouse-inn business started in Nakatsugawa district. The district is known as a heavy snowfall area in the Northeast Region of Japan. A long time ago when there weren’t enough automobiles, villagers had to be united to carry sick people to another village with hospitals, crossing over ridges of the mountain. In deed the village was “unabale to survive without the help from their neighbours”. The snowfall was so heavy that it made school teachers stay at nearby private houses to commute. This nature of the locality with which one cannot go back easily once in, is what made the Nakatsugawa people being friendly to travelers and outsiders.
Traditionally in Nakatsugawa, ceremonies such as weddings and funerals were held at private homes, which is why every house keeps at least 20 sets of tableware as well as beddings and bedclothes. The houses are always open because no one locks the door. Since it’s a remote village, visitors would stay over and talk through the night. The factors, which are related to the severe climate combined in a good way and turned the village into that of “farmhouseinn”.
“Ikarashi—Honke” (meaning the main branch of the Ikarashi family) is an inn made by renovating a 200 year-old house. The size and the high ceiling of the house are the remains of the days when sericulture was prospering in the district. A waterwheel spins in front of the inn and the grand scenery of the Iide mountain range to be viewed from the verandas is one of the great charms. In every July, guests can enjoy fireflies dancing around the stream.
The ages of the farmhouse-inn guests are relatively high. They would find the information on the Internet and visit not only from all over Japan but also from overseas such as Taiwan, Thailand and Hong Kong. “To eat around irori (sunken hearth) seems to be unique to our overseas guests. So they enjoy it very much”.
Snow is also uncommon in Taiwan and Hong Kong, which makes the heavy snowfall of Nakatsugawa especially attractive for the guests from those countries. “When we treated them with ‘corridor of light’ by lighting candles in the snow wall, we turned off all the lights in the house and ate around irori, watching the fantastic candle light reflected on the window. Even I, as a villager, was impressed all over again thinking how lovely this place was”.
One of the huge factors that triggered the farmhouseinn business was when the district was labeled as “Genkai Shuraku” (literally “limited village” or “marginal village” which is the village in Japan experiencing depopulation because more than a half of the population is aged 65 plus.) “It was so mortifying that made us want to do something for our district,” says Ikarashi. Such passion made Nakatsugawa to be populated with visitors even from overseas. “Rather than hoping for more people to come, to think about our capability, current pace seems to fit just right for us. We are planning to develop souvenir confectionery products made with our Iide Rice. But we shouldn’t forget that we need to make this farmhouse-inn proper business that can be inherited to the younger generation”.

Interviewed in April, 2016
Writer : Hideko Takahashi / Photographer : Hiroyuki Tamura