National Village Hida - this open-air museum, which is located in Gifu Prefecture near the town of Takayama. This museum presents the life of peasants Japanese villages in mountainous areas.

The village was built on a hillside overlooking the valley Takayama, next to a large pond. The village has about 30 houses built in the style of the mountain villages, including house style gassho-zukuri. They are distinguished by high gabled thatched roofs that withstand heavy layer of snow in the winter and not get wet during the rainy season. These homes are heated with stoves, chimneys but they were not, because all the smoke went out on the roof arch. Many houses in the village of Hida were transported to the places where they were built, in order to save them as examples of architecture. Age houses in the village, with 100 to 500 years, some given the status of national treasure.

The houses themselves reproduced conditions of peasant life, including furniture, dishes, clothes, and other household items. In addition to residential homes, located in the village of Hida warehouses, the scene for the holidays, workshops. They show visitors traditional Japanese crafts and allow yourself to try to make the wicker crafts, straw or sew something in the style of sashiko (Stitch thick filaments practiced in poor regions to repair wear clothes) - a traditional crafts of local women in the winter. The Hida area also were common kinds of crafts such as manufacturing and dyeing fabrics production lacquerware, wood carving.

Hida was a very affluent area: its inhabitants could not pay the tax or rice or corn, so pay it, spending up to 300 days a year in the capital in the construction of temples, palaces and other buildings as the Carpenters and Joiners. Since the end of XVII century and until 1868, this area as a supplier of wood was under the direct control of the Shogunate.