Shiiba Village

Japanese travel writing usually lists Shiiba with Shirakawa-go and Iya as Japan's three great hikyo. The label is informal, though Miyazaki's own tourism site uses it, and the geography backs it up: steep valleys in the Kyushu Mountains, with houses wherever the slope allows. The village story comes from the Shiiba-yama Yuraiki, compiled in the mid-Edo period. In it, Minamoto no Yoritomo sends Nasu Daihachiro to wipe out the Heike survivors hiding here. He finds them living so poorly that he gives up the hunt, teaches them to farm, and falls for Tsurutomi-hime, a descendant of Taira no Kiyomori. Recalled to Kamakura, he leaves her pregnant. The folk song Hietsuki-bushi sings about it, though that verse was only added in 1940. The tourism association says about one in five villagers is still named Nasu. Tsurutomi Yashiki in Kamishiiba, the Nasu family house, is a long single-row farmhouse built in the late Edo period and an Important Cultural Property since 1956. Next door, the Shiiba Folk Performing Arts Museum explains the kagura, which roughly 26 hamlets perform through the night at shrine festivals in November and December, each in its own style. Shiiba also still practises yakihata: a small plot of forest is cut and burned, cropped for four years, then left to regrow for decades. The village says it is the only place in Japan carrying the method on, and it was a reason the Takachihogo-Shiibayama area became an FAO Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System (GIAHS) site in 2015. Come for at least one night. The drive from Hyuga alone takes close to two hours.