Mark Brazil - The Japan Times

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Mark Brazil

Mark Brazil, a Briton based in Hokkaido, has written about the natural history of Japan in his Wild Watch column for over 30 years. After careers in conservation and natural history television, Mark taught for nine years at a university in Hokkaido before going freelance. He now travels the world as a lecturer and leader on wildlife-focused expeditions.

For Mark Brazil's latest contributions to The Japan Times, see below:

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Aug 17, 2013

Trekking back in time among Okinawa's fronded wonders

A heavy fog hangs around the forested area of Yambaru in the northern hills of Okinawa. On this rainy-season morning in June, there's a steady dripping all around, though what I can see of the sky is cloudless. Instead, this "rain" is droplets that the trees have garnered into their canopies from the clouds, and which they are now dispensing earthward. The smell in the air is of damp moldy fungi and the rich loamy scent of tropical greenhouses. The humidity is high and my glasses are steaming over.

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Jul 20, 2013

Building a case for birds

Many people would consider Stonehenge in southwest England or the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt — which both date from around 4,600 years ago — among the crowning glories of human achievement.

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Jun 16, 2013

Cycads: 'living fossils' with a deadly twist

Almost two months after revelers in most of Japan began partying beneath cherry blossoms in mid-March this year, we hardy northerners in Hokkaido were still waiting patiently for warm zephyrs to waft in with a late promise of spring.

Japan Times

LIFE / Travel

May 26, 2013

Kan Yasuda's tactile art brings new life to Bibai

Kan Yasuda's art somehow draws in the landscape, and entices in people, so that it is natural to explore the view through his structures and keyholes, to sit awhile atop a sculpture or to pose within their frames.

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

May 19, 2013

Dwarf bamboo's no pushover whatever the season

An unseasonably cold spring wind blasts in from the north shaking all before it. Oak trunks tremble; mast-like young white birches sway alarmingly and ineffectively rattle their branches at it.

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Apr 21, 2013

Nature art: It's in the 'I' of the beholder

When a thing of beauty is perceived, the observer experiences some kind of a reaction; but what defines “beauty”? Is it art?

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Mar 17, 2013

Ski sortie takes a shrewd turn for the cuter

It was cold and snowing and my mind was far away: I was already imagining returning to the warmth and color of the indoors after this, my latest winter sortie outdoors. It was only the rhythm of my skiing that was keeping me on track and bound for home.

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Feb 17, 2013

Dancing Demoiselles of the desert

In a dry, dusty, desert landscape, the clamoring of cranes seems so surprising. I am used to the great winter assembly of more than 10,000 cranes in Kyushu at Izumi, where they congregate on winter-fallow rice fields; and I regularly frequent the winter gatherings of Red-crowned Cranes in snowy eastern Hokkaido. I have dreamed, too, of witnessing the hundreds of thousands of Sandhill Cranes that gather on migration on the Platte River in Nebraska.

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Jan 19, 2013

Impossible forests where tides ebb and flow

A ripple flows gently inland across an expanse of dark-gray mud. It washes in, then drains back, dampening the surface; it briefly fills, then empties from, tiny holes made by innumerable small crabs. The ebb is over, and the flow tide has begun.

Japan Times

LIFE / Travel

Dec 23, 2012

Journeying to the ends of the Earth ...

Travel is an addiction for which there seems no cure. Once under its sway, it is best just to ride out the alternating fevers and chills and see where they take you.

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Dec 16, 2012

Beware: Devil birds at work in the woods

The final months of the year seem something of an afterthought following the delightful palette of autumn colors; they offer only fickle moods and fickle weather.

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Nov 18, 2012

The little 'black bird' is a hit, from Liverpool all the way to Asia

It is 50 years this year since the best-selling band in history, The Beatles, released their first single, "Love Me Do." They were set to catapult Britain into the Swinging '60s and launch a global musical phenomenon.

Japan Times

LIFE / Travel

Nov 4, 2012

Lake Shikotsu: a Hokkaido wonderland awaits

I have spent the last four hours perspiring under the summer sun, moving slowly and photographing wildflowers. Having hiked the circuitous, twin-peaked route around the caldera of constantly active 1,041-meter Mount Tarumae, I then loped up and down a small peak known only as Kyu-san-ni (its height, of 932 meters, since kyu means "nine," san is "three" and ni is "two"). With that behind me, it was a half-hike, half-scramble to the top of wonderful, 1,103-meter Mount Fuppushi.

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Oct 21, 2012

Singing the praises of greenery

This year's annual hop between the hemispheres in my capacity as a globetrotting nature-tour guide took me to my namesake country, Brazil, with strange and unusual hopes.

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Sep 16, 2012

Living the botanical high life

Japan, though it has a very different image, is on the same latitude as southern Europe and North Africa, while my nearest city, Sapporo, is oddly enough on the same east-west parallel as France's boisterously cosmopolitan second city of Marseille on the Mediterranean.

Japan Times

LIFE / Travel

Sep 2, 2012

Man on a mountain

In the very center of Hokkaido lies a landscape so far removed from the urban sprawl of much of lowland Japan that you might be forgiven for asking: "Is this really Japan?" Far more reminiscent of the higher latitudes of Kamchatka and Chukotka (northeastern Russia) or of northern central Alaska (United States) than of Kanto or Kansai, the volcanic ranges that span the core of Japan's northern island present to the eye an astoundingly un-Japanese landscape: expansive, even vast, powerful, and providing a sense of true wilderness. For some "marooned" urbanites with a yen for wildness, this might be the very place you have been seeking to "get away from it all."

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Aug 19, 2012

The air around us is teeming with life — it's just too tiny to see

As I approached the top of Mount Tarumae's western peak, located in Hokkaido's Shikotsu-Toya National Park, for a brief moment I thought an early reward was awaiting me in the form of clusters of ripe blueberries in the bush tops. At first glance it appeared that the bushes were in fruit, and it was only on close inspection that I realized just how much hungrier I would have to be to enjoy that mountaintop snack — they were not fruit, they were beetles!

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Jul 15, 2012

Slugs, snails and astonishing tales

Late last month, I arrived at my friends' house in the historic southwest English town of Stroud a little too early, only to find both Ian and Caroline Redmond out. So, with time on my hands, I wandered into their lovely garden on the slope of a hill overlooking the town and began to "potter about."

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

Jun 17, 2012

Rock on down to a geopark near you

To naturalists and hikers, the renown of 810-meter Mount Apoi near the southern tip of Hokkaido towers mightily above its lowly elevation.

Japan Times

ENVIRONMENT / WILD WATCH

May 20, 2012

The wonder of feathers

A soft flake of seeming sky falls, wafts and floats earthward catching the light. Lightly, and soft as gossamer, it lands to add a splash of color to the greenery of spring. It may be no more than a tiny feather that's fallen from a passing bird, but it carries with it a message of mystery and miracle from the heavens.

From easily navigable train stations to the helpfulness of its municipal staff, Tokyo has earned high praise for its commitment to accessibility for disabled travelers.

[Rebroadcast] Japan is doing better on accessibility than you may think

Later this month, author Shogo Imamura will open Honmaru, a bookstore that allows other businesses to rent its shelves. It's part of a wave of ideas Japanese booksellers are trying to compete with online spaces.

The story isn't over for Japan's bookstores

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Vol. 34: Tokyo, a vanguard city for sustainability

Vol. 34: Tokyo, a vanguard city for sustainability

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