"restoring the cedar and cypress forest to its original beauty."
- magichour camp
- Feb 6
- 2 min read
The forest stretching beyond the borders of magichour camp is currently in the midst of a great challenge.
there is no one left who remembers the natural forest of these mountains as it was 150 years ago. stories tell us that until
60 years ago, life here was in perfect balance with nature—washing vegetables in the stream and building stone walls for terraced rice fields and farms.
NOW,
those streams have carved deep ravines, and the stone walls are collapsing under the dense thicket of planted conifers.
like much of japan’s mountains, this land was blanketed with cedar and cypress during post-war reforestation. while these are precious resources, they require human hands to thrive.
we are now acting to bring back the diverse, original forest of this land.
we practice "natural regeneration." instead of planting saplings, we wait for seeds dormant in the soil or carried by the wind to sprout by their own strength.
we watch over them, clearing the underbrush and carefully selecting what grows.
it is a very slow and inefficient process.
this year marks the 5th anniversary, a milestone for our natural regeneration project. we continue the cycle of clearing grass, thinning trees, and letting in the light so that the sleeping seeds in this area—four times the size of our campsite—can finally wake up.
finally, we are seeing the faces of wild cherry, ring-cupped oak, and chinquapin... even tea bushes from the days before this was a plantation. their vitality is different—stronger than anything planted by human hands.
this year, we will continue to walk at the pace of the forest’s breath. looking forward to the day when these trees bloom with flowers we have yet to see, we dream of a future 10 or 20 years from now. even after we are gone, we want this place to be a forest truly called "magichour."
imagining such a future, we take it one step at a time. In peaceful
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