Keeping thatch means keeping somewhere to grow it. Kayabuki no Sato in Miyama is a settlement where several dozen thatched farmhouses survive, surrounded by paddy fields and hills. Roofing on this scale consumes an enormous quantity of susuki grass, so a village that intends to go on thatching has to hold land near at hand where the grass can be cut — the roofs and the ground are a single arrangement.

Miyama-chō Kita was designated an Important Preservation District in December 1993, and the folk museum here allows the interior of one of these houses to be seen properly, which matters because the roof is only half of what makes them what they are. This is a settlement of about fifty households; Sonobe is an hour away by car and central Kyoto about an hour and a half, which is far enough that the village has never been a commuter option. Because a roof is renewed every few decades, the material has to be produced on the same cycle, which means the cutting grounds have to be maintained continuously for a demand that arrives rarely.

A thatched village depends on three things at once: somewhere to cut, people to do the cutting, and craftsmen who can lay it. Lose any one of the three and the roofs begin turning to sheet metal, house by house, usually within a generation — which is what happened almost everywhere else. Miyama still has thatch because it did not let go of any of the three, over a period in which there was every economic reason to let go of all of them. That is a harder achievement than it sounds, and not one of the three is visible in a photograph of the village.