Strange and Impressive Fire Sprinklers of Japan’s Gifu Prefecture

We’ve previously written about the small prefecture in Japan called Gifu, and it’s transformation into a snowy wonderland in the winter. Indeed, this part of Honshu is known as the place with the highest snowfall in the entire world.

We’re revisiting this ancient and beautiful part of Japan to explore another oddity, this time an event called the Water Hose Festival.

As the village of Shirakawa-go is made up of Gassho-style thatched homes dating back to the 11th century, they are particularly prone to fire.  Additionally, the historic town is considered a UNESCO World Heritage Site, making protection of the houses very important.

Ingeniously, the town has advanced and substantial fire protection, in the form of disguised water hoses. Hidden within traditional-looking structures, the roofs open up and douse the houses (and potential fire) in water in a moment’s notice.  Each year the systems are tested a few times, and those tests have become cultural events.

Leave it to the Japanese to be overly prepared for a fire eventuality, plus elegantly keep the look of the UNESCO site intact. Via Colossal:

Shirakawa-go’s drill happens once a year, in late October or early November, when the fire department tests all 59 of the hidden cannons at once and the whole valley disappears under a canopy of spray. The first two frames above come from a second thatched village, Kayabuki no Sato in Miyama, north of Kyoto, which runs the same kind of drill each May and December. The thatch itself is the reason. A gassho-zukuri roof is up to a meter thick, replaced every thirty or forty years by the whole village working together, and it burns like a haystack. We have written about this corner of Japan before, in the hobbit-like village that gets the most snowfall on Earth and the snowiest place on the planet. For more of the country, see Hiroki Matsubara’s beautiful images of Japan.

Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog

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