Sheet metal has been laid over the thatch. Aoni is a settlement of a dozen or so households on a mountainside, and the farmhouses along its road have thatched roofs covered over with metal sheeting. When the labour and the material for re-thatching became hard to find, the choice made here was to cover the roof rather than to rebuild it, and what you see is the result of that decision, taken quietly and household by household.

Stone-walled rice terraces spread across the slope below the houses, the edge of each field standing as its own retaining wall, so that the shape of the mountain itself is stepped for as far up and down as the cultivation goes. Aoni was designated an Important Preservation District in December 2000, and the ridgeline of the Northern Alps sits directly in front of the village. Hakuba station is about fifteen minutes away by car, but the road is narrow and the snow is heavy, so this is not a place people pass through casually.

Terraced fields cost more in stonework than in the ground they produce. Each terrace is small, machinery is awkward on them, and the households here went on cultivating anyway because there was no other way to obtain level ground on this slope. That is the whole calculation. As long as the stone walls are standing, the fields can be brought back into use whenever there is somebody to work them. That is why the walls rather than the crop are the thing that matters about a terrace, and why a terrace left fallow for a decade is not yet a terrace that has been lost.