their skills in the tightly ruled sport. There are several classes of participation including children, women's, men's, and 'just for fun' leagues, and the winners of the main event get to advance to the national competition annually held in Nagano Prefecture. Architecture The original Iya hamlets extend up the valley walls in clusters and only in the past forty years or so have roads been built connecting them to the main roadway at the base of the valley, with many hamlets only getting roads as recently as the 1990s. Many homes sit abandoned. The traditional home building style in the Iya valley is called kayabuki ( 茅葺 thatched roof house, also called minka 民家) and many examples of these buildings still exist, though those with exposed thatch are now usually used as inns, restaurants, or historic sites and not for personal use. Since cutting, bundling and replacing the thatch is a time-consuming and costly endeavor, most personal homes which still have thatch now have it covered over with corrugated tin panels to prevent it from rotting. Though the thatch isn't visible, it is easy to spot these homes on the hillsides as they have thick, high-pitched roofs. Since the 1950s or so many of the thatched homes have had their roof pitch lowered and the roof completely replaced with either tiles or corrugated tin. Historically, it was common for a home site to consist of three buildings: the main home, a barn, and what is locally called an inkyo (隠居) "retirement home" which would be a smaller but independently functioning house for the family's oldest generation. As one set of grandparents died, the next would move into this separate house for some most likely much sought after peace and quiet. The most modern homes from the 1960s onwards lie along the main valley roadside and are often built on heavy steel scaffolds due to the lack of flat space. The frames of the traditional homes are made with massive, interwoven red pine (akamatsu 赤松) or southern Japanese hemlock (tsuga 栂) logs for horizontal beams and squared-off chestnut (kuri 栗) for vertical beams. All are connected through traditional craftsmanship without nails, allowing the wood to expand and contract with the seasons. Some of the oldest building examples still standing date back to the seventeenth century. The foundations are usually made entirely of chestnut beams due to its high strength and anti-rotting