"It's like big-kid Tinker Toys," said Michael Filler, one of several volunteers who paid his way to Japan to pitch in on the project.
Shimmying along a nearby beam was architecture student Chihiro Wada, entrusted with the crucial job of numbering each piece of wood and mapping its position.
As the house came down, word spread. An elderly architect in a kimono stopped by, then returned the next day to work, wheelbarrow in hand. Neighbors saw the structure with new eyes. Yoshinao Matsumoto, 82, shuffled up, a baseball cap atop his thick white hair.
"This is the most valuable building in Soma," he said quietly. "They don't make buildings like this any more."
In its heyday, the stately farmhouse sheltered a rice farming family along with trays upon trays of silkworms raised in its cavernous attic. But like most Japanese, the Konno family had long ago given up farming for city life, and they left this remote community known for its seaweed farms and tasty rice.
Ownership of the house passed to Satoshi Konno, a 36-year-old single businessman who lives in Nagoya. He tried to donate the house to the town of Soma but was turned down.
"I thought I'd have to break it down in my lifetime," said the soft-spoken Konno as he took a last walk through its naked posts and beams.
Instead, he presented it as a gift to Stanley, whom he met through the Assn. for Preserving Old Japanese Farmhouses. Takishita, its president, had saved his first minka in 1965, when dam construction was about to flood a village near his hometown of Shirotori in mountainous Gifu prefecture. He hauled the minka to the hills of Kamakura and went on to devote his life to rescuing farmhouses, moving one as far as Argentina.
"The first priority is to preserve the minka at the original site," Takishita said. "If that's impossible, then at least save it somewhere on Earth."
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FROM the heavy stones at the base of their main pillars to the thatch that typically covers their crowns, minka reflect their native landscape. Some rooflines are steeply angled to shed snow, others flare as gently as a skirt in a breeze. Their flexible frames have weathered earthquakes since the 1700s, but urbanization has nearly done them in.
"Minka are on the verge of extinction at the beginning of the 21st century," said professor Ando, a leader in the preservation movement. Minka are so rare that a village of towering farmhouses in remote Gifu was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1995 and now attracts 1 million visitors a year.
