The carvers' street in Inami, and how to reach it without a car

The Johana line is two cars long and takes about an hour to reach the end of itself, south from Takaoka through rice flats towards the mountains. You are not meant to ride it to the terminus on the first day. You get off partway, wait for a bus, and arrive in a town where the sound you notice before anything else is chisels.

Yokamachi, where the workshops open onto the street

Inami sits at the foot of Zuisen-ji, a Jodo Shinshu temple founded in 1390 and rebuilt more than once after fire. The rebuilding is the whole reason the town exists as it does: in the eighteenth century, carpenters sent from Kyoto taught local men to carve the temple's beams and transoms, and the skill stayed after the scaffolding came down. Yokamachi-dori (八日町通り), the stone-paved approach to the temple gate, is lined with workshops whose doors stand open in fair weather.

Look up as you walk. Almost every shop's signboard is carved rather than printed — the pharmacy, the coffee place, the barber — most of them cut by the person working inside or by someone two doors down. Roughly two hundred carvers work in a district of a few thousand people, which is why the street smells faintly of cut cedar all morning.

Nothing on this street is arranged for visitors. The workshops are where people work, and the road happens to run past them.

木を削る音は、朝の八日町通りではふつうの生活音だ。

Day two, the end of the line and the valley behind it

Ride the local train to Johana, the terminus, and give the morning to Zentoku-ji and the low wooden streets around it. From the station a bus climbs into the Gokayama valley, where the thatched gassho farmhouses at Ainokura stand in a working hamlet rather than an open-air museum. Return the same way in the late afternoon; the last buses down are earlier than you expect.

Getting there

Take the Hokuriku Shinkansen to Shin-Takaoka, change to the local line, and leave the train at Fukuno for a short bus ride into Inami. Several carvers' houses take overnight guests, and some will put a chisel in your hand for an afternoon if you arrange it in advance.