Yesterday I visited Hattori Ryokuchi Park in north Osaka. The most interesting thing there is an open-air museum of old farmhouses.
Set in clearings amidst bamboo forests – which make a distinctive clave-like tocking noise – the farmhouses are tranquil and dark inside.
You kick off your shoes (you can transform them into slippers by flattening the heel section) and walk on the broad, dark floorboards, circumambulating the central pit-fireplaces known as irori.
In some of the houses fire is actually burning in the irori, diffusing the interconnected rooms with a gauze of pleasant-smelling smoke.
In amongst the farmhouses are teahouses, as if the farmers (or their wives) would stop their field-labour for a dainty ceremony from time to time; as though peasants and aristocrats were the same people.
Onions hang out to dry in the sun.
Two kakashi scarecrows. Modern versions (you can see them in the fields which begin to punctuate Osaka’s urban sprawl as you near its fringes) often feature shop-window dummies, but I prefer these malignant-looking straw ones.
A shibamune traditional grass roof.
A display – natsukashi or nostalgic for me, since I visited the village last summer, or should I say “in the year 2314” – of Shirakawa-go.
In fact they’ve transported one of the Shirakawa-go farmhouses here lock, stock and barrel.
“Don’t touch these folk goods.”
