Matsuri no Mori

An attractive open-air museum assembled from real buildings that effectively recreates an entire traditional mountain village. Artisans continue to work in many buildings; you can buy their crafts and even try your own hand at a number of activities. The architectural highlights are the traditional thatched-roof gasshō-zukuri houses, built with roofs like hands in prayer to withstand the heavy snowfalls in this region. More whimsically, there is a giant maneki-neko cat outside, standing over 4 m tall.

This is a beautifully preserved government building from the time of the shogun and still used as local government building until 1969. Many rooms at the beginning of the visit are basically empty tatami rooms with some indication of what the original use was. In the rice storage area there are interesting displays and information (mostly in Japanese) about how local government worked in the Edo era. The two storage buildings alone, the biggest such original buildings still present in Japan, are worth the visit.

It is a very pretty section of Takayama's old city. Consisting of three narrow lanes packed with wooden buildings housing sake breweries and little boutiques, some of the larger merchant houses are now open as museums. The area, though it is definitely worth a visit, is quite touristy now and you will find many tourists around browsing the lanes flanked by tourist-oriented shops. The area is a 10-minute walk to the east of the station.

The museum is in 17th-century warehouses once owned by the Yajima family who ran a timber business and the Nagata family who owned the best sake breweries in Takayama. There are 14 exhibition rooms dedicated to individual themes ranging from the Takayama Festival and traditional houses to the city’s history and local artists.

A 3.5-km-long hiking trail through Takayama's temples and shrines, past some of its more rural neighborhoods, and through Shiroyama Park, the former site of Takayama Castle. The course starts and ends at the Hida Takayama Museum of History and Art.

A popular culture museum with exhibits from the mid-Showa Period (1950-60s). Various streets and shops display Showa-era memorabilia. You can explore the toy shop, appliance store, restaurant, doctor's office, movie theatre, and barber shop. There are also electric collections of battledores, war relics, plastic anime and manga masks, cameras, movie posters and children's toys.