Satoyama

Niigata: Living with Snow 1 Season 1 Episode

The terraced rice paddies with their breathtaking views of the stars reflected in the water mirror. It is 'tanada,' terraced rice fields in Hoshitoge, the name of the hamlet, meaning Star Pass in Japanese. The episode takes viewers on a journey into a small, beautiful farming village deep in the snowy mountains in Japan, where people have tenaciously addressed nature's fury and kept their old farming method to this day to produce the best rice in the country. A year of the snowy satoyama -- it is a story about the bonds among the people and those between the people and the creatures, about the old wisdom the modern world tends to forget.