Timing is everything with Shirakawago. Arrive midafternoon on a fine weekend in spring, especially around Golden Week, and you could be forgiven for wondering why you bothered coming in the first place. Unless you have a fondness for shoulder-to-shoulder stadium-size crowds, the delights of Shirakawago will be scant.

But make it here after the tourist throngs have dispersed, and the living and working Shirakawago reasserts itself. You understand rather more easily why this village of 150 old thatched farm buildings in northern Gifu Prefecture enjoys its huge popularity, and why it was picked by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site.

With tourists gone, the place abruptly become less synthetic: A farmer builds the walls of his paddies; neighbors chat to one another from doorways; children laugh together in the back of a pickup. When evening falls, as if acting on a signal, the frogs in the rice paddies suddenly erupt into throaty chorus. Long before tourists began poking cameras in the direction of Shirakawago's thatched farmhouses, rice was the local agricultural mainstay. And rice paddies still occupy a substantial part of the village area.