IBUSHICommission
The workshop · 工房 · Furukawa, Hida

Eleven people,
and a grass field.

Ibushi works out of a timber shed on the edge of Furukawa, forty minutes north of Takayama. Everything we build goes up within about two hours of it: the farm valleys of the Hida basin, the gasshō villages over the pass, Takayama's merchant streets, and the Noto coast.

We take three or four houses a year. That is not scarcity marketing — it is how many frames one tōryō can mark, and he marks all of them.

A master carpenter in his sixties crouched over a squared timber in a timber-framed workshop, snapping a straight ink line onto the wood with a traditional ink pot and cord, his face lit by daylight from a large open doorway.
The lineage · 飛騨の匠

Hida paid its tax in carpenters.

Hida is mountains. Under the Ritsuryō system of the eighth century a province owed the capital rice and cloth, and Hida could produce neither in quantity — so it was permitted, uniquely, to pay in labour instead. Each year the province sent men to build in Nara and later Kyoto: roughly ten from each village, for a year at a time.

They were called the Hida no Takumi 飛騨の匠, and they built at the capital for something like four hundred years. The skill came back up the valley with them every year, and it is the only reason a remote snow province has a carpentry tradition of that order.

It is the one claim of pedigree this workshop makes, and it is a claim about a place rather than about a family. Anyone working timber in Hida is working downstream of it.

Two large squared cedar timbers with an intricate interlocking joint halfway home, a wooden mallet and chisels beside them.
A pulled-apart lap joint on the bench. Cut for two specific timbers and no others.
The bench · 職人

Who does the work.

  • A master carpenter in his sixties in indigo workclothes, marking a squared cedar timber with a bamboo pen in a timber-framed workshop, absorbed in the mark, daylight from an open doorway behind him.

    Ōno Sōhachi

    Tōryō — master carpenter

    Sixth of his line to hold the title. Marks every frame himself; has not let an apprentice cut a daikokubashira in thirty-one years.

  • A thatcher in her forties in a cloth headwrap standing in a cut field of miscanthus, holding one tied bundle up at chest height and looking along it to grade it, bundles standing in rows behind her.

    Mizuno Kaneko

    Kayabuki-shi — master thatcher

    Runs the workshop's kayaba above Furukawa and grades every bundle that goes onto a roof. Twenty-two years thatching, the last nine leading.

  • A carpenter in her thirties leaning over a large architectural drawing spread on a plan chest, one hand flat on the paper and a scale rule in the other, rolled drawings behind and cold mountain light at the window.

    Ōno Rika

    Carpenter, and the office

    Handles the surveys and the drawings, and cuts. Took the survey work over in 2019 when the archive was digitised.

  • Carpenters in indigo workclothes working along a long bench in a timber-framed workshop — planing, chiselling and fitting a joint — shavings across the floor and daylight through the open end of the shop.

    The carpenters

    Daiku 大工

    Six, between four and twenty-six years at the bench. Two of them came out of the Takayama machiya trade and brought the lattice work with them.

  • Two young apprentices crouched over a whetstone at the edge of a workshop, one showing the other the angle on a chisel, a water dish beside them and a row of chisels laid out on a cloth.

    Two apprentices

    Deshi 弟子

    Five-year terms. The first year is sharpening, sweeping, and carrying, and nobody has ever been talked out of it.

  • A plasterer in his fifties crouched beside a mortar tub, mixing earth plaster and straw by hand and holding up a trowel-load to judge it, buckets of dug earth beside him and a half-plastered wall behind.

    Nakai Tomo

    Sakan — plasterer

    Mixes earth from the site where it can be dug. Works to the season: no finish coat between December and March.

A cut grassland of tall miscanthus thatching reed on a mountain slope in late autumn, pale golden stems standing in tied bundles in rows across the field.
The kayaba · 茅場

You cannot buy this in a hurry.

A kayaba is a grassland held and burned off each spring for one purpose: to grow miscanthus for thatch. Ours is eleven hectares on a south slope above Furukawa, cut in late autumn after the first frosts have taken the moisture out of the stem, then stood in bundles in the field to finish drying.

A gasshō roof takes something on the order of ten thousand bundles. No merchant holds that; it has to be grown, and it has to be grown nearby, because carriage costs more than the grass. Villages held kayaba in common for exactly this reason and lost them when the roofs went to tile.

We bought ours outright in 1994 after two seasons of trying to buy thatch in and finding there was none to buy.

Yui · 結い

Forty people, one slope, one day.

Re-thatching is not a job you can hire your way through. One slope of a gasshō roof is stripped and re-laid in a single day, because a roof opened to the weather cannot be left open, and that takes forty pairs of hands at once.

Yui is the mutual-aid system that supplied them: the village turned out for one household, the household fed everyone, and the debt was written down and repaid when it was someone else's roof. It is a labour ledger, and it is the reason these villages held together as villages.

We still work to it. We bring the scaffold, the grading, the ridge and the tōryō; the village brings the hands. Where there is no longer a village to bring them, we say so before we quote.

About twenty villagers on the steep thatched roof of a farmhouse, passing up bundles of golden miscanthus and combing new thatch flush, old grey thatch stripped from one half.
Since 1968 · 沿革

The short history.

1968
Ōno Sōhachi's grandfather registers the workshop in Furukawa. Three men, all roof work.
1979
First full relocation — a gasshō from a valley flooded for the Miboro dam, taken down over one winter.
1994
The kayaba above Furukawa is bought outright after two seasons of buying thatch in.
2004
Sōhachi takes the title of tōryō at thirty-eight.
2019
The survey archive is digitised: 340 houses measured, of which 61 no longer stand.
2026
Eleven people. Four houses on the books, two of them revivals with the fire already relit.
Every house, as a ridge tag →

Come and see it.

The shed is open to visitors by arrangement, Tuesday to Friday. There is usually a frame on the ground.

Write to the workshop