Tono Furusato Village

The village lies in a valley at Tono in Iwate Prefecture. Seven farmhouses of the local kind, built between the Edo period and the Taisho era, have been taken down where they stood and put up again here, with the barns that went with them, to make a farming settlement as Tono had them in the early twentieth century.

The houses are magariya, the bent house of the Nanbu country: the dwelling and the stable are built as one under a single thatched roof, in an L, so that the family and its horses lived beside each other through the winter. Around them the working parts of a village have been laid out as well — paddy fields and the channels that watered them — and horses are still kept.

The village is worked rather than displayed. Visitors sit on the veranda of a thatched house and are taught to twist straw rope by people who have lived in Tono all their lives, plant rice in the paddies in season, or pound rice for cakes in autumn.

Two of the houses are given over to crafts, one of them a dyeing workshop, and there is a water mill. The staff who keep the place going are called maburitto in the Tono dialect.

Tono is known in Japan as a place of old tales, through the Tono Monogatari, the collection of local legends that Yanagita Kunio published in 1910 and that began the study of folklore in Japan. The village keeps that alive: in one of the farmhouses a storyteller tells the tales, in the local speech, on any day but Wednesday.