Yakushima

The ferry from Kagoshima takes two hours and deposits you on an island that receives more rainfall than almost anywhere in Japan, which accounts for the moss. There is a saying on Yakushima that it rains thirty-five days out of every month, which is geographically impossible and experientially accurate — the clouds come in from the Pacific, hit the central peaks that rise to almost two thousand meters in the island’s interior, and unload. The result is a forest that has been continuously saturated for so long that every surface — rock, root, fallen log, living trunk — is coated in a deep, wet green. The guides here refer to it as the “ocean of moss.” The first time I stopped walking to look at a particularly ancient cedar, I reached out and pressed my hand into the moss covering its base and it held a cup of water.

The cedar trees are the reason Yakushima is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Yakusugi, the local name for the ancient cedars that have survived here because the dense, resin-heavy wood resists both rot and the historical demand for lumber, grow slowly in the high elevation and acidic soil, and some of the specimens still standing in the interior forest have been dating by researchers at three to seven thousand years. The Jomon Sugi — the most famous, and thought to be the oldest — sits at the end of a four-to-five-hour hike through increasingly ancient-feeling forest, and its presence when you finally reach it is not exactly beautiful in any decorative sense. It is too vast and too strange for that. The trunk is roughly sixteen meters in circumference, knotted and twisted over millennia into forms that do not resemble what a tree is supposed to look like, the bark grey and deeply furrowed. A viewing platform keeps you at a respectful distance. Standing there, I felt the specific quality of awe that arrives not from beauty but from scale and age — the feeling that you are very new here.

The Shiratani Unsuikyo Ravine is a shorter and more accessible walk into the high forest, following a river through cedar groves and past waterfalls, and it is where Hayao Miyazaki reportedly spent time before making Princess Mononoke — the resemblance to the film’s sacred forest is not coincidental. The trees here are younger than the Jomon Sugi but no less atmospheric, and the trail in places follows a narrow path above the river where the cedar roots have grown so large they form the walking surface itself, stepping from root to root across a floor of moss. I walked it in light rain, which is probably the correct conditions, and the forest in wet light has an quality that is simultaneously claustrophobic and deeply peaceful — the canopy absorbs all external sound, and what remains is water on leaf and the occasional distant rush of the river below.

The island’s coast, in contrast, is tropical and bright. Sea turtles come ashore on the beaches from late May through July to nest, the same beaches where loggerhead and green turtles have been nesting for thousands of years. I watched one at night from the approved viewing area — a loggerhead that had hauled herself above the tide line and was excavating her nest with slow, meticulous swimming motions of her rear flippers, utterly indifferent to the dozen people standing quietly behind the rope. Her size was remarkable, larger than I expected, the shell a mossy grey-green that matched the island itself.

The village of Anbo on the island’s east coast has a couple of good restaurants serving flying fish — a Yakushima specialty, dried and used as stock in a broth that carries the sea without tasting specifically of any fish I could identify. Simple, warming, perfect after a day of wet forest.

When to go: May and June for sea turtle nesting; October and November for cooler temperatures and reduced rainfall (relatively). Avoid summer typhoon season for the hiking trails. Rain gear is essential regardless of when you visit — assume you will get wet and dress accordingly. Book accommodation well in advance as the island has limited capacity.