Yakushima: The Island of Thousand-Year Cedars
A round, mountainous island south of Kyushu holds some of Japan's oldest trees, in a forest so wet that everything is covered in moss. It was among the country's first World Heritage sites. Which walks to choose, and how long to stay.
Yakushima lies in the sea south of Kyushu. It is nearly circular, about 505 square kilometres in area, and almost all of it is mountain: Miyanoura-dake, at 1,936 metres, is the highest peak in Kyushu. About 11,700 people live in villages around the coast. The interior is forest.
In 1993 some 10,700 hectares of that forest were inscribed as the UNESCO World Heritage site of Yakushima, among the first four in Japan. The forest is notable for its cedar, Cryptomeria japonica, known in Japanese as sugi, which on Yakushima reaches exceptional ages.
Rain and old trees
Yakushima is one of the wettest places in Japan. Annual rainfall runs from about 4,000 millimetres on the coast to as much as 10,000 in the mountains. The islanders joke that it rains thirty-five days a month. In winter the peaks carry snow while the coast stays subtropical.
The cedars grow slowly on granite with little soil, and their wood is dense with resin, which resists rot. A cedar over a thousand years old is called a yakusugi. The forest was logged from the Edo period, when the timber was split into roof shingles and paid as tax. The oldest and most misshapen trees were left because they were useless to the cutters. Those are the trees visitors come to see.
Jomon Sugi
The best known is Jomon Sugi, identified in the 1960s high in the interior. It is 25.3 metres tall and 16.4 metres round. Estimates of its age range from about 2,000 years to 7,200 and are uncertain. To protect its roots, visitors now see it from a platform about 15 metres away.
Reaching it is a long day’s hike. The usual route, the Arakawa trail, is about ten hours there and back. Much of it follows the track of an old logging railway, level and easy underfoot, before a steep climb on wooden steps for the last few kilometres. On the way it passes Wilson’s Stump, the hollow base of a giant cedar felled centuries ago, large enough to walk into, and named after the English botanist Ernest Wilson, who photographed it in the early twentieth century. From March to November private cars are not allowed at the trailhead, and walkers take a shuttle bus that leaves early in the morning, and tickets should be booked in advance.
Shorter walks
Shiratani Unsuikyo is a ravine of streams, boulders and cedars covered in thick moss, with marked circuits of different lengths, from under an hour to several hours. Its green, dripping interior is said to have inspired the forest in Hayao Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke. Yakusugi Land, despite its name, is a quiet area of forest with boardwalks and several named thousand-year trees, and is the easiest place to see them.
On the north-west coast, the beach at Nagata is a nesting ground of the loggerhead turtle, one of the most important in the North Pacific. The island’s own subspecies of macaque and deer are common along the forest roads, and there are hot springs on the shore, some of them usable only at low tide.
For travellers
Yakushima is reached from Kagoshima, at the southern end of Kyushu, by hydrofoil, by slower car ferry or by a short flight; the island also has its own small airport. Three nights is the minimum that makes sense: one full day for Jomon Sugi or a long walk, one for Shiratani Unsuikyo, and a margin for weather. A hire car is the practical way to get around.
Bring proper waterproofs and boots in every season. Guides are available for the Jomon Sugi walk; they are not required, as the trail is signed in Japanese and English, but many walkers find them useful.