Japanese Countryside

This is a collection of photos taken from the backseat of a car, driving through Northern Hyogo Prefecture, Japan, during mid-fall. We stopped at a road stop, and also at a roadside restuarant. The claw sign was motorized, and would open and close slowly as cars drove by. Many of the towns in rural Japan are laid out so that the homes and businesses are near each other, because the electric and other services are run to a central area. This means that farms and wilderness are able to be spread out more, and you can drive through vast areas, without seeing many people.

In the evenings, when we were staying in Sasayama and Deven would cook dinner, sometimes we would watch recordings of this show, where the hosts send a reporter and a camera guy to a house in a a remote location, and interview the people living there. Most of these people had large farms they were managing, and would have houses deep in the woods, on the side of a mountain, and did not have electric run to them from the nearby town. Because of this, they would have set up other ways to heat and cool things, like a fire to heat water for the bath, or generators for refridgeration.