The largest historical building is the Honjin, a wooden inn that was set aside for high-ranking government officials and which is now a museum. A small temple partway up the hill at the northern edge of the village offers a spectacular view over the settlement, while a Shinto shrine is set back from the main street amid cedar trees.
In the summer months, the crops in the surrounding paddy fields are bright green and insects hum on the breeze; in the depths of winter, all is coated with a thick mantle of snow, the black pine trees on surrounding hills making the view appear monochrome.
The village is picture-postcard perfect, and it takes a lot of work to keep it looking that way.
US$120 for a sheet of paper? Japanese washi – its uses, and why it’s pricey
US$120 for a sheet of paper? Japanese washi – its uses, and why it’s pricey
Takamitsu Sato was born in the village, and left to go to university. He returned at 22 to help at his family’s soba restaurant, and with Ouchi Juku facing many of the problems that afflict rural Japan – 42 per cent of the village’s current 134 residents are over 65 years old – he felt the need to step in to help preserve its traditions.
“When I came back, I cannot say that I had a deep love of thatching, but as I have grown older, I have come to understand that the thatched roofs here are unique and an important part of our community,” he says.
“But the number of skilled thatchers was declining as they got older and there was a growing sense of crisis that soon we would not have the people needed to repair our own roofs.”
Sato and a colleague completed a course in thatching and turned the local school – which had closed around the turn of the century, when there were just a handful of children living in the village – into a space where the skills could be passed on.
Soba restaurant Misawaya occupies a 250-year-old thatched property on the main street of the village. It specialises in cold noodles topped with katsuobushi bonito flakes that should be eaten using a raw leek. Tradition holds that good fortune will befall anyone who is able to consume the entire bowl of noodles using only the vegetable.
Another speciality of the restaurant is tochi mochi, a variant of mochi rice cakes made in a laborious production process that involves soaking horse chestnuts in water for several days to make them soft enough to peel and pound into a paste. Tochi mochi is served with a sprinkling of kinako roasted soybean flour or azuki bean.
Across a snow-covered pass to the east of Ouchi Juku is the city of Koriyama, and the oldest producer of whisky in the Tohuku region. Master distiller Shohei Kuroba oversees production at the Azumi Distillery and says his main tools are patience and time-honoured methods.
The distillery is within the grounds of the Sasanokawa Shuzo sake brewery, which was founded in 1765. The whisky business dates back to 1946, when there was a shortage of rice for sake, as it was needed for food, and there was demand among the American Occupation forces for whisky.
After lulls in the business as Japanese consumers turned to imported labels, the high quality of domestically produced labels once again brought the Azumi Distillery to the attention of connoisseurs of single malt and blended whiskies, both in Japan and overseas.
“We only produce a maximum 200 litres of whisky a day, which is one barrel, largely because we do all the processes by hand, starting with the separation of the malt into three parts in a handheld shaker box, just as they did in Scotland in the past,” says Kuroba.
The mash is churned before being placed in fermentation tanks made of 500-year-old wood, instead of the more common stainless steel. And while other distillers typically complete the fermentation process in 70 hours, Kuroba stretches the procedure out to 100 hours. The mix is then transferred to one of the two pot stills.
“Distilling whisky can be a bit like raising children,” says Kuroba. “Sometimes it is easy and everything goes smoothly, but not always. But we build up experience […] and we like to try different things, to learn from our errors and provide subtly different flavours.”
As well as being ideal for making whisky, thanks in large part to an abundance of fresh spring water, this part of Fukushima is also ideal for ageing the drink, he says.
“We are surrounded by mountains, including Mount Bandai, so in the winter it is very cold, but in the summer it gets very hot and it is not uncommon to see temperatures of 35 degrees [Celsius/95 degrees Fahrenheit],” he says. “That wide temperature range makes the ageing process faster than in Scotland and elsewhere.”
A highlight of any tour of the distillery has to be the opportunity to sample five varieties – some are lighter and have hints of the oak barrel they were aged in while others display peaty or sweeter notes – and blend a whisky with amounts of each.
When the perfect combination has been discovered, a visitor can fill a 200ml bottle as a memento of Fukushima prefecture.
