Minamiaizu · TateiwaNo.568★★Open in map →
Maezawa Magariya Village
— A hamlet of L-shaped farmhouses in the Minamiaizu mountains
A mountain hamlet in Minamiaizu where the farmhouses are built in an L, with the stable wing attached to the house. The traditional buildings stand along a single lane, most of them still lived in, and the hamlet closes to visitors through the snow months.
- FromAizu-Kogen Ozeguchi Station (Aizu Railway / Yagan Railway)
- ~30-40 minTaxi from the railhead
- Maezawa Magariya Village
The sweet spot
This is not a forgotten place — it carries a national designation and has a car park and a museum. What keeps it quiet is that people live here. There are no shopfronts along the lane, the season is short, and the hamlet shuts down to visitors once the snow arrives.
Where it is
20 more notes in Fukushima · open the map →What to look for — in walking order
- Maezawa Magariya Museuma farmhouse moved here from another valley and opened up, the one building you can go inside
- The lane of thatched roofsthe run of houses whose ridgelines and pitch repeat all the way along
- A stable wing up closethe short arm of the L, with its gable window, timber lattice and carved eave front
- Kashima Shrinethe hamlet's small shrine, set back from the lane
- The hillside lookouta short climb on a mountain path to the one point that takes in the whole hamlet
How to actually get there
- Asakusa or Utsunomiya → Aizu-Kogen Ozeguchi Station (through services on the Tobu, Yagan and Aizu lines).
- Aizu-Kogen Ozeguchi Station → Maezawa (booked taxi or demand taxi; allow half an hour or a little more).
- Car park → the farmhouse museum, then walk the lane from end to end.
- Return by the car you booked — settle the pickup time before you start walking.
- From Aizu-Kogen Ozeguchi by taxi
- Aizu-Kogen Ozeguchi is the railhead, reached from Tokyo on the through trains from Asakusa. From there the hamlet is roughly half an hour by road, a little more if the driver takes it gently. The tourism association lists a local taxi company for the run, and the valley is also covered by a bookable demand taxi. Either way, arrange it in advance: no car waits at the hamlet.
- Getting back to the railhead
- Arrange the return leg before you are dropped off. Road services through this valley are thin and the demand taxi needs booking, so a hamlet with no shop and no station is a poor place to improvise. Ask the museum staff to call for you if your plan falls apart.
About the place
Maezawa sits in the Tateiwa district of Minamiaizu, in the mountains of south-western Fukushima. Around twenty traditional houses stand along the lane, and the ones that give the hamlet its name are built in an L: a long living block with a shorter wing turned out at right angles. That wing was the stable, attached to the house so the horses stayed warm through the winter. The thatched roofs sit at the same pitch and the same height all the way down the lane, because the hamlet was rebuilt in one go after a fire, by carpenters working to the same idea at the same time.
How to enjoy it
Late spring and autumn are the two windows worth planning around, between the thaw and the first snow, and the museum keeps daytime hours only. Give yourself an unhurried hour: walk the lane out and back rather than in a loop, because the L reads differently depending on which side of a house you approach from. Save the climb to the lookout for last, since the view down over the roofs makes more sense once you have walked underneath them.
Background & history
The hamlet was selected as an Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings on 20 June 2011, in the category of mountain-village settlement, covering 13.3 hectares. The designation came late by the standards of such places, and the reason is instructive: residents had spent decades preserving the roofs under their own local rules rather than accept the constraints of a national listing, and only turned to it when the money for thatch upkeep grew thin. The uniform look predates all of that. A fire swept the houses away in 1907, they were rebuilt together by carpenters from the surrounding valleys, and the hamlet has read as a single design ever since.
Before you go
- Cash
- The lane itself costs nothing. The farmhouse museum charges a modest admission, collected in cash — there is no card terminal and no IC reader anywhere in the hamlet.
- Before you go
- Maezawa closes to visitors for the winter, from around November until the snow clears in spring; the museum and the management hut shut for the same period, and the reopening date is announced fresh each year rather than fixed, so check it before you travel. Note also that these are private homes: stay on the public lane, and do not walk into yards or photograph through windows.
- Another way
- Aizu-Tajima on the Aizu Railway is the other way in, using the Tateiwa demand-responsive taxi, which has to be booked in advance. By car, the approach is from the Nasu-Shiobara interchange on the Tohoku Expressway.
- After you get off
- There is no walking route from the railhead — the last stretch has to be bus, taxi or car. Once you are at the hamlet car park, everything in this note is within a few minutes on foot along one lane.