The Japanese have always seen nature (ancient trees, huge rocks, arresting waterfalls, and even animals) with high regard, rendering seemingly mundane objects of nature sacred. For many, there is a belief that kami, or divine essence, inhabits all aspect of nature and life. Such is perhaps a somewhat accurate and briefest explanation of Shintoism.
The signs of the sacred in Japan are everywhere. By the streams. In the middle of a neighbourhood park. Along the flowers. Or even with the swing of the seasons. You will witness them, if you have been here. Torii gates, for instance, red and black, and shaped like a gate, mark the boundary between an ordinary space and the sacred, says the American writer Hanya Yanigahara. Shimenawa, the thick tassels that loop around trees or stones with dangling white arrow-shaped shide, are thought to invite kami into a worthy host, she added.
It would be folly to dismiss the quiet rejuvenating power of being in nature. I learnt this from the Singapore-based forest therapy guide Khloe Teo, who very briefly showed me how to forest bath in the Singapore Botanics Garden. And so it is in this pilgrimage to Japan that I sought out nature to reboot from a mildly burnt out and frazzled life.
My current pilgrimage to Japan brought me to many places, most memorably Enoshima (less of this in this story) and Ito. The former is a small island, off the shore of Kamakura; the latter is south of Atami and faces the Pacific Ocean. Two things stand out.
The first: a Camphor tree, over 2,000 years old, that anchored in the ground of Kinomiya Shrine in Atami. It’s not tall exactly, but thick, swollen at the base like something that had once been injured and decided, obstinately, to keep growing anyway. Towering, unbothered, it looked as if it had grown indifferent to time.
Mortality, in its gaze, must be a passing thing. Human lives, how laughably brief, flicker in the timeline of this behemoth.
The second: a short trek along the Jogasaki coast, also near Atami. What begins as a gentle walk (think: broad paths, neatly spaced trees, a view of the sea framed like a postcard) shifts almost imperceptibly. There are two trails to follow here: through the forest and a coastal-leaning one. I embarked on the latter, and quickly became a victim of countless stairs and somewhat narrower, rockier terrains.
The Earth I trudged wearily across (shoutout to Kevin Yap for legs day) spoke in deep time. The land beneath my feet, where waves from the Sagami Bay crash violently into rock, is the aftermath of several volcanic eruptions from aeons ago.
The Izu Tobu volcano group, a scattered family of monogenetic volcanoes, each erupting only once, was responsible for this. Lava that erupted from Mount Omuro eventually met the bay, cooled into land, then was weathered into what now stands.
At one point, I climbed across some formations and sat on a boulder overlooking the ocean, the sky so clear and as vast as its counterpart. Below me, waves hurled themselves at the rock, restless and forming foam. I thought about how much of world was made like this: forged from violence.
The camphor tree made me think of time as something slow and watching. But here, on this coast shaped by violence, time is explosive. And only time can cool the heat off. Eventually, but surely.
