This valley also manufactured the raw material for gunpowder. Suganuma is a small settlement on a river terrace above the Shō, where nine gasshō-zukuri houses survive among about ten households in total. There is a museum here covering enshō and paper, and seeing it alongside the interiors makes clear what this valley actually produced. Enshō is potassium nitrate: it was made by fermenting earth and plant material under the floor of the house, which means the building was simultaneously a dwelling and a piece of manufacturing equipment.

Suganuma was designated an Important Preservation District in December 1994. The Gokayama interchange is close and Takaoka is about an hour away by car, though those figures describe the summer. In winter the snow has to be cleared, and when it lies deep the ways out of the settlement narrow considerably. A mountain village had very few routes to cash income. There was little paddy, so the household economy was assembled from things that could be done indoors during the snow months.

Enshō, paper and silkworms were the three, and they were combined rather than chosen between. Each one occupied a different part of the same building: the ground beneath the floor, the working rooms, the space under the thatch. Seen in that light, a gasshō-zukuri house is less a farmhouse with a large roof than a small factory with three separate production areas stacked vertically, in which a family also happened to live. The scale of the building follows from the number of jobs it had to hold.