National village Hida is a Museum under the open sky, which is located in Gifu Prefecture near the town of Takayama. This Museum presents the life of Japanese peasants of villages located in mountainous areas.

The village was built on a hillside overlooking the valley, Takayama, near a large pond. In the village there are about 30 houses built in styles, typical of mountain villages, including houses in the style gassho-zukuri. They are distinguished by a high pitched thatched roofs that withstand its heavy layer of snow in the winter and did not get wet during the rainy season. These houses were heated with stoves, but chimneys in them was not, as all the smoke left on the roof. Many of the houses in the village Hida were transported from the places where they were built, in order to preserve them as specimens of architecture. The age of the houses in the village, is from 100 to 500 years, some has a status of national heritage.

In the buildings reproduced the setting of peasant life, including furniture, dishes, clothes, other household items. In addition to residential homes, in the village of Hida are warehouses, a stage for festivals, workshops. In them, visitors show a traditional Japanese craft and give the opportunity to try to make woven crafts made of straw or to make something in the style of sashiko (thick stitch threads practiced in poor regions for repair of worn out clothes) – a traditional form of needlework of local women in the winter. In the Hida area also existed such types of crafts, manufacture and dyeing of cotton, the production of lacquerware, woodcarving.

Hida was a very poor area: the residents could not pay the tax no rice, no grain, and therefore paid out, spending up to 300 days a year in the capital for the construction of temples, palaces and other buildings as carpenters and joiners. Since the late seventeenth century until 1868 this region as a supplier of wood was under the direct control of the Shogunate.