Gokayama Suganuma Gassho-zukuri Village

Suganuma is a small hamlet of nine gassho-zukuri farmhouses on a river terrace of the Shogawa in Nanto, Toyama, and, together with Ainokura, one of the Gokayama components of the UNESCO World Heritage Site 'Historic Villages of Shirakawa-go and Gokayama' inscribed in 1995. Its compact scale, roughly a third the size of Ainokura, makes the steep thatched roof-lines and the surrounding rice terraces and river valley easy to take in from a single viewpoint above the settlement. Two houses have been converted into museums: the Gokayama Folklore Museum, which displays farming tools, silk-cultivation equipment, and washi papermaking implements used in the valley's historically self-sufficient economy, and the Gunpowder Museum (Enshou no Yakata), devoted to the production of ensho, a saltpeter and gunpowder base that Gokayama villages supplied to the Kaga domain under a system of secrecy during the Edo period, since the material was fermented from silkworm droppings, mountain plants, and soil in raised floorboards beneath the houses. The gassho roof trusses, tied with straw rope rather than nails, follow the same snow-shedding steep-pitch design found across Gokayama and Shirakawa-go, allowing communal rethatching roughly every few decades. The village's curatorial approach is a short, self-guided loop connecting the overlook viewpoint, the two small museums, and the working farmhouses, giving a compact but complete picture of the valley's isolated pre-modern economy.