At the height of summer, I went to Takachiho in Miyazaki Prefecture, driving from Kumamoto over the southern tip of Aso. I wanted to see Wait—the Japanese cedar or Cryptomeria japonica. Takachiho is full of sugi. No, it’s actually more accurate to say it’s full of sugi and full of shrines. No, it’s actually more accurate to say it’s full of nooks, crannies and gorges. Located on the outskirts of Takachiho, Iwato Shrine has all three: sugi, shrine, and gorge.
Iwato Shrine has an East Shrine and a West Shrine with a gorge running between them. If you ask at the western shrine, the elder priest will open the closed gate and let you in. Deep inside, in a stand of trees, there is a place of worship marked out from afar, and from there we can see the gorge. You can see the opposite shore. As I watched the trees cover both sides, giving a light deep enough to take my breath away, the priest spoke and said, shintaior place where the What The shrine houses the cave that served as the hideout of the sun goddess Amaterasu, a well-known tale from Japan’s earliest mythology. He said it’s over on the other side of the gorge, but no one has been in it for hundreds of years, so it’s in pretty bad shape.
He said there were seven old sugi growing over there, and it was not a place where people could go, but you could see the tops of the trees from where we were. I looked where he was pointing and there were thick, fluffy treetops sticking out of the forest canopy.
It’s really cool they originally came from the Taxodiaceae or Cupressaceae family. It is thanks to the burgeoning research of molecular phylogenetics since the 1990s that this is now so ambiguous. I must try to accept the fact that the Taxodiaceae family has been absorbed into the Cupressaceae family, in the same way that I have accepted the gradual disintegration of the Liliaceae family. But back in the day, when the Taxodiaceae family was just the Taxodiaceae family, plain and simple – a state of affairs I found comforting – it contained many types of sugii, such as Japanese sugii, but also sequoias.
NNorth America is a continent of amazing rock formations. The world-class rocks—the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Canyon of Zion National Park, Bryce Canyon—come up to you with their amazing colors and scale. But the presence of sequoias, which have lived for thousands of years, overshadows these rocks.
When I stood in front of a giant tree called “Sherman” in Sequoia National Park, facing this life form that was much bigger than me and long past my age, I thought that my feelings at that time were similar to religious faith or belief. I’m sure I wouldn’t feel the same way about a person, no matter who it is, or an elephant, no matter how big, and not even if I was facing a tiger on an empty stomach the moment I needed to eat it.
No matter how much I gaze in wonder at the cliffs and valleys of the Grand Canyon or Monument Valley, this saying never comes to mind. But every time I see a giant sequoia, I think, “There’s no way it has Buddha nature.”
I was not yet 50 at the time; I was tiny, helpless, just a speck. My companion was a giant tree, two thousand and hundreds of years old, but still reproducing and constantly planting young trees in the area. I wondered if this life force was absorbing me – but it wasn’t the same as a tiger. It’s not like they’re going to ruin you, eat you, or even hurt you. It felt more like ‘swallow’, more like an ‘intake’, as it were.
There is a saying that “every living thing has buddha nature.” There seems to be a lot of debate about whether this is true for inanimate things like mountains, rivers, grasses, and trees. I don’t know what conclusion they came to. However, as I stare in wonder at the cliffs and valleys of the Grand Canyon or Monument Valley, this saying never comes to mind. But every time I see a giant sequoia, I think, “There’s no way it has Buddha nature.”
To Go to Takachiho from Kumamoto, you need to pass the town of Minami Aso Takamori, then head east. I have an old sugi In Takamori. This is a tree called Takamoridono no sugi. It is said that in this place four hundred years ago, during the Tensho era, a powerful local clan named Takamori lost a battle and was committed by the feudal lord. seppukucutting open his belly. I don’t know if it’s sugi it grew in memory of this act of seppuku, or if the tree was already there and he committed the seppuku as he leans into it, but a blood-soaked spot anyway.
The first time I went there, I was shocked. You see, in Takamori, there is a small sign standing prominently on the side of the road that seems to be ignored. Ignoring him, I turned and zigzagged down the narrow path. And then there was a small gate on the path that was rudely closed. It had a lock wrapped around it and it looked like it couldn’t be opened or closed. It was the end of the line for the weaker ones. But when I looked closer, there was a note hanging on the gate. It read: “Lots of people have come here recently to see the tree for a TV show. Hunters, beware.” Across the road was a pasture, and several cows looked suspiciously that way. There was also a pasture inside the gate, and so cows roamed inside. The purpose of the lock seemed to be to prevent the cows from running away. While the cows remained suspicious, I undid the lock and entered, then closed the gate and returned the lock to its original position. Inside it was hard to tell if there was a trail or not. Suddenly the height rises. I was out of breath. They are flowering, from the Liliaceae family, the Asteraceae family or the Apiaceae family. There is cow dung everywhere. Looks like I’ll end up getting into some. The path, which may or may not be a road, continues forward towards a sugi grove. It’s rich. An ant has a rather small sign pointing into the grove, so I have no choice but to bend down and descend into the cavernous center of the grove.
What overwhelmed me as I got to the center of it was the sensation of lively movement I felt from the sugi. (there were two of them). I didn’t get this feeling of lively movement from any big sugi elsewhere. The branches of these sugi they twisted and turned and split in two before my eyes. One went up, the other left and right – it looked like they were jumping up and down. They reached the heavens before my eyes, then came back down to earth, covering the space in between and creating a giant dome with an arched ceiling. Branches and leaves grew densely from their trunks. The sap of the tree circulated from tip to tip. Words I knew a Lotus Silk “Big roots, big stems, big branches and big leaves.” Around the sugi the trees were groves of bright-leaved evergreens. As the sunlight filtered through them, each leaf shone brilliantly one by one. I wanted to sing more a Lotus Silk: “Medium roots, medium stems, medium branches, and medium leaves.” Then tiny vines, tiny mosses and tiny ferns covered everything, covered the bark of the tree trunks, covered the skin of the earth. Once again I would like to continue chanting, “Little roots, little stems, little branches, and little leaves.”
“The little ones belong to him / They are weak, but he is strong” is what I want to sing too (although it is from an ancient translation of a certain Meiji era hymn). It continues: “Yes, Jesus loves me / Yes, Jesus loves me / Because the Bible tells me so.”
The fact that one can confirm one’s smallness and weakness when something bigger and stronger is in front of him, and that it is okay to be small and weak, and if we rely on this big one, then we can continue to live our lives as yourself, as we are – the many ways of expressing these thoughts were tightly packed into the space around me and made me feel warm.
♦
By Hiromi Ito Wood Spirits Grass Spiritstranslated by Jon L. Pitt (Nightboat Books, 2023), courtesy of Nightboat Books.
