Hida, Gifu

The drumming begins at three in the morning. This is the essential fact of the Furukawa Festival: it starts before dawn, in the cold of early April in the Hida mountains, with bare-chested men carrying an enormous drum through narrow streets and beating it — loudly, insistently — to wake everyone inside.

The Okoshi Daiko makes no accommodation for sleep or cold or the preferences of onlookers. By sunrise, the formal festival begins — floats with mechanical figures performing acrobatics, the precise counterpart to the night's raw energy. The contrast is the point.

The Furukawa Festival is usually mentioned alongside the Takayama Festival as the two great spring festivals of the Hida region. They share a valley and a season and almost nothing else. Where Takayama is stately, Furukawa is physical, nocturnal, and loud. Only one of them will keep you awake all night — which is, depending on what you came for, either a problem or the point.

In a town where carp swim, you face the wood. Hida-Furukawa in Gifu has rows of white-walled storehouses, and hundreds of carp swim in its Seto Canal. It is a quiet, graceful town. It is also a town of artisans. The woodworking skill called "the craftsmen of Hida" still lives here. Kumiko joinery, fitting wood into intricate geometric patterns without a single nail; woodwork; furniture-making, the craft of handling wood by hand is everywhere in this town. The stay program lets you experience these skills: watch the artisan's hands up close, touch the wood with your own. What a machine could do in an instant, the craftsman does by hand, over time. Why? Because it makes something more beautiful. A world of handwork, the opposite of efficiency. Within slowly flowing time, you come to know the joy of making.