Yoshino, Nara

You walk through the mountains, and you look. In Okuyamato, the deep mountain region of southern Nara including Yoshino and Tenkawa, an art festival is held in autumn. But it is unlike an ordinary museum. The works are scattered through the mountains, the forests, beside the rivers. Visitors walk, spending a day climbing mountain paths to find the pieces, sweating as they go. "A journey through the mind," the festival is called, and the walking itself becomes the experience. A single work set down in a forest of autumn leaves; you stop, catch your breath, and face it. They are not in convenient places; only those who reach them can meet them. Okuyamato is also a land of mountain asceticism, where walking the peaks polishes the spirit, and that spirit runs through this festival. To see art, you climb a mountain; it comes close to pilgrimage.

On Yoshino, the blossom climbs.

Some thirty thousand cherry trees cover this mountain, divided by altitude into four belts—lower, middle, upper, and innermost—and they do not bloom together. They bloom in sequence, from the foot of the mountain upward, the flowering taking more than a week to ascend the slope. To watch Yoshino is to watch spring itself move, slowly, uphill.

This was a sacred mountain long before it was a famous one. A center of Shugendo, the old mountain asceticism, its cherries were never planted to be admired. They were offerings, given to the deity Zao Gongen, replanted generation after generation across a thousand years. What you see is not a garden but an accumulation of prayer that happened, over centuries, to become a landscape.

Knowing this changes the white slope. These are not trees for looking at but trees for giving away, and the difference, once you feel it, is hard to unfeel. There is a phrase in Japanese—hitome senbon, a thousand trees at a glance. On Yoshino the glance comes four times, and the mountain takes its time delivering each one.

Looking five hundred years ahead, you plant a tree. Yoshino in Nara is famous for its cherry blossoms. But it is also a home of forestry. Yoshino forestry has a history of more than five hundred years, one of the oldest forestry regions in Japan. What grows here is Yoshino cedar and Yoshino cypress, straight, knot-free, with fine growth rings, known as the finest timber. Why does such wood grow here? Because people have tended it with painstaking care. They plant densely, raise slowly, thin again and again; a single tree may take a hundred years before it is cut. Forestry is an investment in the future; the tree you plant now you will not harvest in your own lifetime. You plant for your children, your grandchildren. In the experience program, you enter the mountains, look up at the trees, fell a tree, and come to know the weight of a tree someone planted a hundred years ago.