There is a school in a place where the snow lies over two metres deep. Shiramine is a sericulture village on the upper Tetori River, and its houses are large, three storeys tall, and fitted each autumn with yukigakoi — timber screening put up around the walls. The eaves are deep so that snow does not strike the wall directly, and the covered strip beneath them becomes the winter walkway between buildings.

Shiramine was designated an Important Preservation District in July 2012. The snow screening is not a permanent fixture: it goes up every autumn and comes down every spring, which is an annual obligation for every household in the village and a fair measure of what living here costs in labour. Kanazawa is about an hour and a half away by car. The snow exceeds two metres, and yet there are both an elementary and a junior high school here, which is the clearest available statement that this is a village and not a monument.

The third floor exists because of the silkworms. Putting the rearing rooms high in the building placed the workspace above the level the snow reaches, which solves two problems with one storey. Houses in heavy snow country are built on the assumption that the ground floor will become unusable: once the drifts are up, people come and go through the first floor, and the ground floor is treated more or less as storage. The centre of the household migrates upward for several months. A three-storey farmhouse here is what happens when that pattern and the requirements of sericulture point the same way.