It wasn’t the heat of the sun that stopped me in my tracks on a Shinjuku street — it was the absence of shade.
I had just gotten back from a visit to Nagoya, where I once lived amid smokestacks and train lines. For the first time in years, I made a pilgrimage to see the Giant Camphor Tree that grows on the grounds of Atsuta Shrine. Its hulking, thousand-year-old limbs capture the strong sunlight and cast it soft and dappled, as if its leaves were green stained glass, onto those below. The tree had a way of making the grounds quiet, the air cool and the breeze feel full of the rich and healing scent of life.
Japan is a country of spectacular trees: the crimson blaze of autumn maples, the blush of cherry blossoms in spring and evergreen forests that cloak entire mountainsides in deep green. Trees here are not just admired — they are, in many cases, revered.
But the trees I’d missed most weren’t on the protected grounds of a shrine. They stood along the narrow lane near my apartment, about 10 minutes from Shinjuku Station, marking the edge of a quiet elementary school. They weren’t ancient or photogenic. They were mulberry trees, mostly — fast-growing things that leaf out thick and green by mid-April. However, they were the trees on my street. I thought of them as neighbors.
Now they were gone. As I hauled my travel bag down the street in unseasonable warm weather, I noticed the towering pines of an old shrine to my right were still there, but from my left, the hot sun was now shining right on my face. Every mulberry had been cut down. Instead, a new sheet-metal fence guarded the elementary school in a prisonly gloom.
I now knew how many others in Tokyo had been feeling.
On Oct. 28, 2024, Mitsui Fudosan and a team of developers made their first cuts at Jingu Gaien — a sweeping redevelopment project backed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government. The plan: build new stadiums, a hotel, a plaza, tennis courts. The cost: over 600 mature ginkgo trees, part of a historic 100-year-old park that has long been one of the city’s most beloved green spaces.
For months and years, a fierce movement of locals has opposed the plan. Among them is consultant Rochelle Kopp, who started a Change.org petition to rethink the redevelopment in 2022. It has amassed over 235,000 signatures and she is now the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Tokyo Metropolitan Government.
“The more I learned, the more I realized that the problem goes far beyond the trees and the extensive other environmental impacts,” Kopp says. “The project is emblematic of the tremendous problems with how public development happens in Japan.”
The issue isn’t confined to Tokyo. Japan’s forests — some of the most biodiverse on the planet — have over decades been reshaped by industry, war and postwar reconstruction. In the countryside, a dwindling population has left entire tracts unmanaged. And in the cities, where space is prized and progress moves fast, trees are often the first casualties of growth.
A culture that once built shrines to sacred groves now routinely fells them for stadiums. The centuries of wisdom still lingers — only to be increasingly ignored or paved over.
The flying plum
The scholar and poet Suguwara no Michizane (845-903) was, by all accounts, a dendrophile — someone who loves trees. A bureaucrat and politician in ninth-century Kyoto, he was exiled from the imperial capital after a conflict involving the powerful Fujiwara clan and was tragically separated from his beloved plum trees. In his sorrow, he composed a waka poem:
When the east wind blows / Send me your scent, plum blossoms / You may have lost your master / But do not forget the spring
According to legend, one of Michizane’s cherished plum trees missed him so dearly that it tore from the earth and flew through the sky to reunite with him in exile. That very tree, known as Tobi-ume (flying plum) still stands on the grounds of Dazaifu Tenmangu shrine in Fukuoka Prefecture, kept alive for more than a millennium through careful grafting.
It is one of many sacred trees enshrined across Japan, where myth, memory and reverence take root in living wood. Venture down any country road or city avenue in Japan, up a wooded hill or along a trail to the sea, and you may encounter one: an old tree, thick with age and bound with a coarse straw rope around its trunk. Woven into the twine are a few strips of paper that resemble lightning bolts. These ropes are called shimenawa and they mark the tree as sacred in the cosmology of Shinto, the indigenous faith of the Japanese archipelago. Long before shrines were built, trees themselves were revered.
This reverence extends not only to individual trees but to entire species. In Nagano Prefecture’s Kiso Valley, five native varieties — hinoki (cypress), kōyamaki (umbrella pine), asunaro (thujopsis), nezuko (Japanese thuja) and sawara (golden mop) — were once so prized that they were designated the Five Sacred Trees of Kiso, and protected by law during the Edo Period (1603-1867). Even today these trees are regarded as providing some of the highest quality wood in the country, with Kiso hinoki offered up to rebuild Ise Grand Shrine, the holiest site in Japan.
Due to the length of the Japanese archipelago, there is an incredible variety of climates in which trees can grow.
“Because Japan has a lot of rain, forests can grow anywhere,” says Tohru Nakashizuka, president of the Forest Research and Management Organization. “From Okinawa to Hokkaido, from subtropical forests to boreal forests, Japanese forests have a remarkable species diversity.”
Nakashizuka adds that, according to a survey by his organization, the approximately 1,200 types of trees that can be found in Japan is around double that of comparable areas in Europe or the United States.
The satoyama method
This reverence for trees can even be seen in the way traditional communities have historically managed their own local grove.
The traditional Japanese village structure, known as “satoyama,” would dictate forests be planted on one or multiple sides of a settlement. These wooded margins served multiple purposes: sheltering homes from wind and sun, preventing erosion, providing timber and kindling and supporting biodiversity. However, in many regions, these methods would eventually be tossed aside in favor of modern convenience and economic growth.
The history of Japanese woodlands is a tempestuous one that brought them to the brink of destruction countless times. By the end of the Heian Period (794-1185), the forests around Kyoto and Nara were already stripped bare due to development. Centuries of war followed, further decimating the country’s forests. By the start of the Meiji Era (1868-1912), iconic peaks like Mount Rokko in Kobe were almost completely denuded. Nakashizuka estimates that less than 1% of Honshu’s original primeval forest survives today.
“There were two waves of tree-planting,” he says. “One after the Meiji Era began, up until the demands of World War II, and then another during the (postwar) growth period, when energy production switched to oil and gas, and later, cheap foreign wood began to enter Japan.”
Fast-growing sugi (cedar) and hinoki (Japanese cypress) were planted en masse across Japan’s bare mountainsides, a reforestation strategy that would define the landscape for decades to come. Then in the 1990s, trade liberalization made imported Southeast Asian timber cheaper than native wood, relegating Japan’s domestic forests largely to disuse.
Today’s familiar mountaintop view — dense evergreen cedar forests, broken by occasional patches of deciduous foliage — is less a timeless natural scene than a modern outcome. For many years, these mountains were heavily logged or even barren, and before that, they were covered with some of the world’s most ecologically diverse forests.
Still, traces of that raw beauty remain and are by and large celebrated.
Masahiro Ikeda, director of the Japan Plant Friendship Association, says that nothing matches the moegi-iro —a slightly yellowish green — of fresh-leafed trees in April and May. “But you need to go high into the mountains,” he adds. “It’s the same with autumn colors — you won’t find real color in the big cities.
A paradoxical relationship
In Obihiro, Hokkaido, citizens have spent nearly 60 years growing their own 11-kilometer-long forest. By hosting annual tree-planting festivals, the city encourages participants to plant new trees and rebuild native woodland. Taking inspiration from the global protest movements of the 1960s, Obihiro’s activists succeeded in creating a modern “garden city,” centered around a massive forest made by and for its citizens.
Meanwhile, a group of around 20 elderly activists in Tokyo have spent months guarding the gingko trees along Kanda Police Street, hoping to prevent them from being razed. Their protest is part of a growing wave of outrage against similar acts of tree removal. Redevelopment plans for Hibiya Park have raised concerns that hundreds of century-old trees could be cut down. Kasai Rinkai Park faces a similar fate, with some 600 trees slated for removal. While park space in Tokyo has grown slightly over the past decade, tree cover has declined — an alarming trend in a city increasingly plagued by a worsening heat island effect and dangerously high summer temperatures.
Christian Dimmer, a professor of urban design at Waseda University, explains that in places where the traditional relationship between people and trees has been disrupted, trees are often seen as maintenance burdens or safety risks.
“This perception is reinforced by local governments, which often prioritize cost efficiency, risk reduction and the elimination of potential nuisances over the many benefits trees provide,” he says.
Still, Dimmer and Ikeda point out that aging trees can pose legitimate risks to pedestrians and must be replaced — such as the 52 trees being cut down in Todoroki Ravine.
“Artificial forests need management,” says Ikeda. “They need cutting, pruning and care. If a large branch falls on your head, that’s instant death — which is unacceptable in a city.”
“Rapid urbanization has led to the collapse of traditional local communities and folk practices,” says Eijiro Fujii, emeritus professor at Chiba University. “In addition, as governments increasingly outsource the management of green spaces to private businesses, there is less specialized knowledge on how to manage these spaces.”
Fujii has spent his career studying the psychological function of green spaces. By measuring eye movements, blood flow and brain responses, he investigates the unique psychosomatic effects of observing forests and gardens. His results suggest that the unique structure of Japanese gardens can provoke a kind of neurological empathy toward trees and stones.
Fujii’s work is part of a broader, often overlooked sphere of advanced forest research in Japan. While famous flowers and controversial development projects make headlines, institutions across the country are quietly investing in cutting-edge approaches to studying — and sustaining — the nation’s arboreal resources.
One of the most influential developments in recent decades is the Miyawaki Method. This dense-style planting technique was developed in the 1970s by botanist Akira Miyawaki, who passed away in 2021. Drawing on research into Japan’s native forest ecology, Miyawaki advocated for planting diverse, indigenous species side by side — forcing plants to compete for growth, and re-creating the multilayered canopies of Japan’s ancient forests at remarkable speeds. The method has planted at least 40 million trees at over 3,000 sites worldwide.
Today, the Forest Research and Management Organization has close to 500 scientists working hard on projects that include breeding trees that grow faster, absorb more carbon dioxide and emit less pollen; developing biodiversity-friendly logging methods; and engineering a new laminated wood strong enough to support 10-story buildings. In Maniwa, Okayama Prefecture, researchers are creating ways to generate energy from unused wood waste. In Yusuhara, Kochi Prefecture, the town has innovated ways to sustain its forests in spite of depopulation, funding forest management from profits generated by selling renewable energy.
Mikiko Ishikawa, professor and author of “Green Spaces and Culture,” studies how urban greenery can serve a community as a form of social wealth. She points to tree-lined Sendai — known as “the city of forests” since the Edo Period — as a city that has made deliberate use of trees to shape civic identity.
Better tree management, experts say, is hindered less by technological limits than by awareness. Dimmer explains that while complex urban environmental problems need to be solved in an interdisciplinary way, uniting environmental concerns with social and economic considerations, “(Japan’s) environmental experts are often trained in isolation,” he says.
Nakashizuka agrees that public understanding of trees and the services they provide remains limited. Trees moderate the climate, filter the air, mitigate disaster risk, preserve biodiversity, absorb carbon and manage stormwater. They provide raw material, energy, and psychological soothing and grounding. “We need to find better ways to make use of Japan’s diverse forests,” he emphasizes.
A few trailblazing entrepreneurs have begun to do just that, thinning and harvesting forests that, if left unmanaged, risk landslides and wildlife loss. But the forestry industry — squeezed by lower profitability and labor shortages — remains in dire straits.
Still, the truth is that Japanese trees have known far worse days. Once, mountaintops across Honshu stood bare. Perhaps we are standing at the start of a new cycle — an era that again arcs toward richly diverse forests of deciduous trees and to people living in close harmony with them. Trees to cool summer streets and shield against winter wind. Trees for timber, for food. Trees to love.
“No country loves trees and forests as much as Japan,” Ishikawa says. “They are the origin of the Japanese spirit.”
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