Terraced fields and thatched houses survive in the same valley. Shingawa-Tagomori is a mountain settlement on the upper Kumanoue River, where thatched farmhouses and stone-walled rice terraces continue along the valley together. The old houses were not moved to a museum site: they are still standing where they were built, which means the relationship between house, field and hillside can be seen intact rather than reconstructed.

Shingawa-Tagomori was designated an Important Preservation District in July 2012 and continues as a settlement of a dozen or so households. Ukiha's town centre is about thirty minutes away by car. Maintaining the terraces takes labour, and finding that labour is the central problem here, more pressing than anything to do with the buildings. Because the terraces pass water downward from one level to the next, a single collapsed wall affects every field below it, so maintenance is collective whether or not anyone wants it to be.

Move a farmhouse to preserve it and you lose everything around it. A building of this kind means something because it stands inside a working relationship with fields, forest and water, so deciding to keep it in place is a considerably harder undertaking than protecting the house alone would be. It commits the community to maintaining the whole system rather than a set of roofs. What is being kept at Shingawa-Tagomori is not a collection of houses at all. It is a working valley, with the houses as one component of it, and the terraces as another that requires attention every single year.