Best village by a dam site

 I didn't think I could get everything I wanted in an actual location. I was this close to just making up some snowy landscape a plot-convenient distance from Kyoto.

But I kept reading, and I just happened to look in the right place, and all research directions I'd been looking at before came together.

This is just what happened in Fox and Hounds. I'd been reading up on various Roman discoveries and the Crossrail project and the Aux units and the Deep Underground Shelters and of course ghost stations -- and when I looked at the old Nine Elms station it all fell together. A largely imaginary history of this one-real station, but it tied so neatly into real history of the London Underground and the Shelters and the quite topical big construction and excavation in that area.

Anyhow. The village is Shirakawa-go. Or, rather, that's part of the story. This is another "lost in time" preserved historical village, with a distinctive snow country architecture. It is in one of the areas where they have a heavy (and early) snow, meaning thick snow in late December is quite accurate. It is a 3-4 hour drive from Kyoto. It is remote and isolated and sparsely populated and there is a convenient mountain involved as well. It isn't, unfortunately, the mountain that is famous for the Tengu, or one that is closely associated with ninja (or yamabushi) but that's okay.

Because there is also a dam. As soon as I saw that, I started looking, because there are known ghost towns in Japan that were abandoned as a result of a dam. (Not drowned so much as cut off sufficiently to become irrelevant and economically unsustainable.) And the date of the dam is 1960s -- so I get to have my ghost town be the bucolic post-war architecture.

(And heavily disintegrating, because building philosophy at the time was lightweight wooden buildings intended for a mere 30-year life span.)

So there's almost too many connections into thematic meanderings about Japan's aging populace and the flight into urban areas and the efforts to recover and restore old buildings...

And there's an onsen, of course there is. 

Oh, did I explain? The routine with the abandoned village is an intentional reference to the abandoned (but rather older) Japanese buildings of Yamatai, from the current Tomb Raider reboot. Pretty much, all I want to do is look at them. Although it is tempting to have a fight there, now that I think about it...