Hakusan City Shiramine

A Silk Village in the Snow Country of Mt. Hakusan

Shiramine occupies a thin shelf of land on the west bank of the Tedori River, in the southeastern corner of Ishikawa Prefecture. Winter here is severe. Snow regularly settles past two meters, and in heavier years it climbs higher still. The village answered that climate with a particular kind of house, tall and thick-walled, and in July 2012 the Agency for Cultural Affairs recognized roughly 10.7 hectares of the settlement as an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings.

What greets a visitor first is the street itself. Land was scarce on the river terrace, so houses stand shoulder to shoulder directly along the road, two and three stories high. Many have no projecting eaves at street level, which gives the older ones the blunt, boxy look of earthen storehouses. The effect is unusual for a mountain settlement. Shiramine reads less like a scattered hamlet and more like a compact town that happens to sit deep in the hills.

From Ushikubi to a Sericulture Town

The settlement was once called Ushikubi. Its exact origins are unclear, though written records confirm it existed by the sixteenth century. Local tradition reaches back further, crediting the monk Taicho, said to have opened Mt. Hakusan to worship in 717, with a role in the village's beginnings.

Rice barely grew here. Hemmed in by mountains, with sharp swings of temperature and a short cold season, residents turned to other livelihoods: charcoal burning, slash-and-burn cultivation, and above all the raising of silkworms. Sericulture in the area is old, traced back at least to the middle of the sixteenth century, and it shaped both daily life and the buildings themselves. By the Edo period, multi-story houses were already common, their upper floors given over to trays of silkworms.

A travel account from the mid-Meiji period describes Ushikubi as a busy place, with a police substation, a registry office, inns, restaurants and dry-goods shops. For a village walled in by mountains, that was a striking degree of activity, and it grew from silk.

Why the Streetscape Was Designated

The preservation district runs about 230 meters east to west and 960 meters north to south. It was selected under the criterion that recognizes building groups whose form, together with their surroundings, clearly express the character of a region.

Shiramine meets that standard through the close fit between its houses and two forces: heavy snow and the silk trade. The settlement's value lies less in any single grand structure than in the survival, as a whole, of a mountain village shaped by an unusually demanding environment. At the center of the district stand shrines, temples and the homes of leading families, ringed by long runs of stone wall that organize the slope and give the core its distinct texture.

Reading the Houses

Almost every detail of a Shiramine house has a reason, and most of those reasons are snow.

The roofs are gabled. Upper floors carry pillars set at half-ken intervals, a little under a meter apart, so the windows between them are tall and narrow. The walls are remarkably thick. Their base is a lattice of branches called naru, only two or three centimeters across, packed and then plastered over, and the finished surface on the upper stories is a warm ochre. The ground floor is often boarded; the upper floors, plastered. Seen in a row, the ochre walls and the procession of slender windows give the street its signature rhythm.

Two features reward a closer look. On the second floor, beside or above the entrance, many houses have a wide opening called a sedo, used for moving firewood in and out when the ground floor lay buried in snow. On the gable end, some houses carry a small projecting structure known as a butsudan-dashi. The family Buddhist altar sat behind it, placed so that no one would walk above it and so that, in a fire, the altar could be passed straight outside. Many roofs also kept a large ladder propped in place the year round, ready for the work of clearing snow.

The grandest house in the village belongs to the Yamagishi family, former headmen who acted as intermediaries between the authorities and the eighteen villages of the Hakusan foothills. Its broad ochre walls and ranks of vertical windows show the local style at full scale. Today the building serves as a base for a local nature school.

Around the Village

Shiramine rewards an unhurried half-day. Rinsai-ji, the oldest and largest temple in the district, stands a short walk from the village center. After the government order of 1874 separating Shinto and Buddhism, the Buddhist images on the summit of Mt. Hakusan faced destruction. Villagers from the surrounding communities petitioned to bring them down, and a number were given shelter here. A hall beside the main temple now displays these "descended Buddhas," among them a bronze eleven-headed Kannon designated an Important Cultural Property, alongside a seated figure of the monk Taicho.

The craft of silk survives nearby at a weaving studio open to visitors, where Ushikubi-tsumugi pongee is made from thread drawn from double cocoons, spun by two silkworms together. The technique is a designated intangible cultural property of the prefecture. A short distance on, the Hakusan-roku Folk Museum gathers six traditional houses of the Edo and Meiji periods, relocated and preserved, with displays on mountain life.

For a different register of deep time, the Hakusan Dinosaur Park draws on fossils found in the area and offers a fossil-digging experience. When the day is done, the village bathhouse, Shiramine Onsen Soyu, runs a sodium bicarbonate spring known locally as the "silk-skin water." Visitors who come in winter may catch the February snowman festival, when roughly a thousand snowmen are lined along the streets and lit after dark.