Stunning Japanese hike is like stepping into an (animated) movie

Sydney Morning Herald

2 days ago

A related topographical quirk is Yakushima's location within the East China Sea's warm Kuroshio Current. Even in winter, the seawater averages 19.2 degrees, ensuring the island maintains a mild subtropical climate with cool summers and warm winters.
The islanders like to explain the divergent topography thus: 'Oceanside, Yakushima is like Okinawa, but in the mountains it's like Hokkaido'. And: 'In Yakushima you can decorate a snowman with hibiscus flowers'. Another local saying: 'In Yakushima it rains 35 days a month', is equally revealing, although understandably, not as popular on tourist brochures.
From the ferry port, it's an easy stroll to clifftop Hotel Yakushima Ocean & Forest where I am based for three nights. This 60-year-old officious looking place, formerly a government building, is now privately owned with a recent and decent facelift that makes it feel something like an alpine resort. Its 90 rooms all have ocean views, the best of which are Western-style with balconies overlooking the salt-sprayed cliffs. But it feels right to be in a Japanese room where I sip tea cross-legged on a tatami mat, knowing that my mattress will be dutifully rolled out on the floor come bedtime.
Ideally, you'd stay a week on Yakushima and explore the entire clock via the island's loop road, but in two full days I'll tick off just the north-east coastline (about 1 o'clock to 4 o'clock) detouring inland for the hike. Along this part of the coast it's relatively flat with low-rise village houses and small-town infrastructure dotted amid a Tetris of citrus, tea and potato crops. Bougainvillea blooms along the roadside next to papaya trees and banana palms.
At the inlet where the Anbo River meets the ocean the beach is sandy blonde, its warmish waters attracting swimmers, snorkelers and scuba divers. My guide, Mizuha Higashi, aka Mish, leads me upstream instead to a little wooden jetty where we slip into kayaks for a paddle along the waterway. It's a forest bathing exercise, the river banks dense with giant rhododendrons, camphor and beech trees. I paddle around the roots and rocks on the water's edge, peering into its translucent depths.
Heading back downstream, Mish points out the simple waterside house where Hayao Miyazaki and the lead artists on the Princess Mononoke film based themselves while studying the film's forested world. Its significance resonates the following day on our hike through the Shiratani Unsuikyo Ravine.
From the trail head, the dirt path continues along a crystal clear stream over big granite boulders and across a little storybook wooden suspension bridge. As we ascend, the forest foliage thickens, filling in the canopy above us like puzzle pieces. In the gaps, thin shards of light illuminate miniature ecosystems of ferns, fungi and cushiony wet moss where cedar tree seeds germinate before taking root in the granite rock.
We walk on passing azaleas, sakura cherry trees, evergreen mountain ash, hemlock and fir. Towering century-old camellia trees with bright orange trunks appear young against the millennial cedars; their gnarly girths, too wide to hug, dot our path like woodland gods.
Generally, the Taikoiwa Rock trail is 5.6 kilometres – about four hours, but recent rain means a harder, longer (10-kilometre) detour that takes us along the Kusugawa Sidewalk. This natural rock path was painstakingly constructed 300-400 years ago during the Edo Period, so loggers could access the cedar trees. Back then the tallest, straightest cedars were harvested to make hiragi – lightweight wooden roof shingles that were also used as currency to pay land taxes. The less desirable cedars, including the ko-sugi – those that grow from the 'parent' stump of the felled cedars – remain today and are what makes the forest so magnificent.
Stepping over slippery tree roots and trickling water channels, we continue to Kuguri-sugi cedar, its split trunk parting like curtains we can walk through, and Nanahon-sugi cedar, another wizened woodlands dame, 18 metres tall and said to be 2000 years old.
Finally, at almost 900 metres, we enter the Moss Covered Forest of Princess Mononoke, where in the darkness a cool white mist shrouds us in stillness. The story goes that the Studio Ghibli artist Kazuo Oga had a favourite spot here where he would spend endless hours sketching the landscape and imagining its mythical inhabitants.
As Ashitaka says in the film, 'this place is magical … a place for gods and demons'. And it is. This is a forest preserved in time, a world carpeted in lurid green moss where dragonflies flit, minuscule flowers bloom and giant tree roots hide the would-be tiny houses of forest creatures.
As if on cue, we see a young Japanese couple taking in-situ photos of tiny figurines – the film's tree spirits, known as kodama in Japanese folklore.
These endearing white ghosts with tiny bodies, cute misshapen heads and glowing eyes exist only when the forest is healthy and so become the film's symbol of hope for the natural world.
Enchanted, we snap our own photos, then trudge on, eager to get to Taikoiwa Rock, the trail's balding rocky summit. Up here among the clouds the stillness prevails, at least until 'silence boy!' echoes around the mountains.
THE DETAILS
Fly + ferry
ANA (ana.co.jp) and Japan Airlines (jal.co.jp) fly from Sydney to Kagoshima via Tokyo Haneda from $1220 return. Yakushima is a two-hour ferry ride from Kagoshima city.
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Stay
Hotel Yakushima, Ocean & Forest (en.hotel-yakushima.com) has six room categories and an onsen. Double room rates (some including a traditional Kaiseki dinner) from 12,000 Yen ($A130).
The writer was a guest of JNTO.