Kominka in Aichi Prefecture. (Courtesy of Kominka Collective)
What is lost when old Japanese folk houses are torn down? The answer is not only a building. It can also mean the loss of carpentry techniques, local materials, village memory, and a way of living that shaped rural Japan for centuries.
That is the concern driving Kominka Collective, a not-for-profit organization working closely with Toda Komuten and other preservation partners in Japan to preserve Japan's kominka—traditional folk houses, often built with heavy timber frames, earthen walls, tiled or thatched roofs, and shiguchi joinery that required no nails.
Kominka Collective Director of Programs, Research, and Education Andrea Carslon says the group's mission is to save kominka and other traditional structures while also creating opportunities to pass on traditional building arts. The organization also hopes to contribute to the revitalization of rural communities, many of which are aging, shrinking, or disappearing.
Kominka are not a single architectural style. They vary dramatically by region, climate, occupation, and local materials. A farmhouse in snowy Niigata may look very different from one in Aichi, Gifu, Okayama, or Kyoto. Some have vast, layered roof structures. Others are built around powerful beams darkened by smoke and age. Many feature shoji sliding screens, fusuma partitions, traditional wooden doors, tatami mats, ranma transoms, ceramic roof tiles, and irreplaceable hand-worked timber, while some properties also include kura storehouses or other auxiliary structures.
Disappearing in Plain Sight
Carlson emphasized that the point is not simply that these houses are beautiful. They also embody skill. "Around the world, people are just so impressed and so interested in joinery and the incredible skill with which these structures were built," she explained.
In 2020, UNESCO recognized traditional Japanese building techniques as intangible cultural heritage.
At the same time, Carlson noted, the structures that keep those techniques alive continue to be demolished. She cited government research showing that the number of kominka fell by 13% between 2008 and 2013, from 1.797 million to 1.566 million.
Furthermore, Carlson referred to preservationist Alex Kerr's 2022 estimate that just over one million kominka may remain—far below the 1.566 million counted in 2013.
The pressures are familiar across rural Japan: depopulation, aging owners, inheritance issues, maintenance costs, changing lifestyles, and the difficulty of finding people willing and able to live in old houses. In some villages, nearly every house has become an akiya (vacant home in Japanese). Some can still be saved. Others are already too damaged.
Preservation Where Possible
Kominka Collective's first preference is always preservation in place. "Kominka and other structures should stay where they are," Carlson said. The organization tries to encourage responsible stewardship, especially when people from outside a community want to own or care for a rural house. That means checking whether a building is structurally sound, connecting owners with local carpenters, and ensuring they understand their local responsibilities.
The group is wary of a romantic version of kominka ownership in which someone buys an old house in the countryside but cannot maintain it or participate in village life. "The upkeep and the village responsibility can become quite a burden," Carlson said. "And then it doesn't end well for anyone."
When Relocation Is the Only Option
When a building cannot be saved where it stands, Kominka Collective works with partners to disassemble it carefully and find it a new home.
Some structures have been relocated within Japan. Others have gone overseas, including to Oregon, Massachusetts, and Jamaica. One kominka from a lost mountain village in Niigata is being rebuilt as a meditation center in Jamaica. A former silkworm workshop is set to become a timber-framing workshop in Massachusetts. Additionally, a shrine theater that was set to be torn down has just been sent to Massachusetts, where one of Kominka Collective's collaborators, Kominka North America, will rebuild it.
Carlson knows relocation can sound controversial. But she stressed that the choice is often not between keeping a house in its original village and sending it abroad. It is between saving it somewhere and watching it be destroyed.
"When a kominka or another structure cannot be saved, which all too often is the case, then, if and when we can, we want to try to take it down very carefully, disassemble it, and then try to find a new home for it," she said.
The problem is time. When a house is scheduled for demolition, the group may have only a month's notice. Disassembly, transport, storage, and reconstruction are expensive. Keeping buildings in storage until a new owner appears is not sustainable. "We wish we could save all of the kominka," Carlson said. "But we're not able to do that yet."
Keeping Old Materials Alive
That is why reclaimed materials are central to the group's work. Together with Toda Komuten, the family company of architect Koji Toda, Kominka Collective keeps and reuses old beams, posts, doors, shoji, tatami, roof tiles, kura doors, ranma, and even entire timber frames.
When a full reconstruction is impossible, these materials can still live on in new projects. Carlson said she once imagined relocated kominka would always be faithfully rebuilt exactly as they were in Japan.
She has since accepted that this is not always possible, especially when a building must meet modern legal and safety requirements overseas or be adapted for use as a residence, retreat center, gallery, or workshop.
The key, she said, is not rigid replication but faithful reuse. The aim is to preserve "the extraordinary materials," the joinery, the aesthetic, and the skill embedded in the structure. Kominka can be creatively reimagined, she said, as long as they remain "faithful to their spirit" and to "the reuse of the amazing materials and the skill with which they were built."
That point is crucial because kominka preservation is not only about saving finished buildings. It is also about keeping traditional building knowledge alive. The group organizes study tours, workshops, cultural events, and fellowships that introduce participants to master carpenters, temple builders, roof thatchers, metalworkers, traditional Japanese washi paper makers, and kumiko latticework craftspeople.
A Crisis Beyond Architecture
Koji Toda said the crisis facing kominka "is almost a symbol of the wider challenges facing Japanese society": population decline, rural depopulation, vacant homes, inheritance burdens, tax rules, costly building regulations, and the disappearance of local carpenters who know how to maintain traditional houses.
Kominka Collective Representative Director Kunito Niwa said the government has largely pushed in the opposite direction: toward demolishing old houses and building new ones. A major turning point came after World War II, when Japan's building standards changed and prefabricated homes spread. Traditional houses built before the modern Building Standards Act became harder and more expensive to maintain or adapt.
Hopes Abroad
Niwa said Japan also lost an older cycle of reuse. In the past, carpenters preserved beams and other valuable materials from houses being dismantled and used them in new buildings. "That cycle has disappeared," he said. "Now it's cheaper not to use them and build a manufactured house instead."
That shift has weakened the transmission of traditional skills. Young carpenters have few chances to learn kominka construction because there is not enough work. Careful disassembly and relocation can therefore be among the few ways to study how these houses were made.
"If we don't create this kind of work, the skills of traditional construction cannot be passed on," Toda said.
For Toda, relocation overseas has also raised a more unexpected possibility. "I've started to think that these techniques do not necessarily have to be passed down only inside Japan," he said. "Perhaps overseas carpenters can inherit Japanese traditional building methods and carry them forward in their own countries."
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