6 Yakushima

My friend from university, Takamaru invited us to his village on Yakushima. There is no mobile phone signal where he lives, so we communicated in emails and before we had left Okinawa i told him we would be coming Thursday morning (6 Aug) but since then I could not connect to internet. Well, we know the name of the village and his name, so I was sure we would find him. We were picked up by a local farmer with a small truck and I could smell freedom riding on the back of the truck on the winding roads with the sea to our right and wide green mountain forests on our left.  When our driver heard we are heading to Shirakoyama and we don't know exactly where, he offered to take us all the way. When I saw the road going uphill from the main road following a river for about 4km I was very thankful for the extra ride. It turned out that Shirakoyama is not a traditional village, it is more like a settlement in the forest, with about 15 households scattered in the woods, mostly hidden under the trees. After some investigation we found Takamaru's house and him and his parents were quite surprised as we turned up at their front door at their morning teatime. The Tetsuka family, as his dad told us, moved here about 25 years before. They already had four children and they lived in a small wooden hut for a year, until he built their house in the woods. I look at the tiny mum with bright eyes, and as i would try to compliment her to live with four kids in such circumstances she adds with a smile "one chilld was born while we were in the hut". Wow. And then two more in the family home in the woods, the last (seventh) kid my friend, Takamaru, who is a great guy full of ideas and energy to make them real. Right now he came home for two months from Okinawa to make a small house of cedar wood and bamboo, which could serve as a community space for the locals. He loves his home village and does everything he can to help it stay alive. 

the frame of the building

with Takamaru

Like in the old Japanese rural homes, the fireplace is in the middle of the house. They make fire every day and cook there or sit around it like a campfire, talking, exchanging stories. Spending a week there I understand what Mr Tetsuka was telling me: it is essential for us to meet with the element of fire every single day. Fire is magical, it is mesmerizing. And this way we are reminded that these woods sustain our lives. Their water is directly from the clean river by the house. 

The River

We were introduced to most of the locals right away, it looked like we are everyone's guests, I could feel a strong community. But it was somehow different. All the people living here came on their own iniciative and chose this lifestyle for themselves. They all have their story, they make the most of living in the wild and are proud of the way they have chosen. It looked like a great community that holds together but at the same time gives enough freedom for the members to find their true selves. it is something very rare to see (especially in one of the worlds most conformist societies). Later on the week we have met Dourin san, a zen buddhist monk, who built his own meditation hall up in the woods. "I built my house, than the sleeping room for the meditators and I learned carpentry while doing that. The last work was the meditation hall, i wanted to make it the best I could". And it is an amazing piece of work, a silent sermon on mastery and patience.

We helped Takamaru with his work, which gave us a different task every day. We cut bamboo, cut cedar trees, tied branches to the frame of the house and prepared leaf-bouquets for the roof. As part of his project to bring community life into the village we organized a screening of Under the Same Sun in the community center, around 30 people came and many thanked us after the movie, they said it was inspiring for them. Well, it was a good exchange then, because their island has been very inspiring for us. They brought food and drinks with them, we ate smoked fish, deer and we also tried rice cooked on open fire in bamboo sticks. 

invitation to our film screening

cutting bamboo

Very surprisingly, the sun was shining on us every day, on an island that is said to have the most rain in whole Japan. When we were hot we went down to the river for a bath. 

Hunor and I, we lived in a small wooden building near the community centre and had our own fireplace. Some days (although almost every day we were invited to someone's house for lunch or dinner) we would make our own fire and cook pasta or sweet potatoes. The peak of our meeting with the wild was the lunch when we got some deer stew from Taka's mum and prepared toast for it on the open fire. Hunor was sitting there half naked, hairy chest, holding the pieces of bread on the end of a fishing spear over the fire to toast them. Then as we start eating, he finds something hard in the deer stew and guess what: it was a piece of pellet they shot the deer with. Well, I guess we need a bit of time to get used to the local lifestyle, but yes, we loved it. 

washing machine (note the amazing view from the window!)

our home in Yakushima

toast on fire

before tchewing on he pellet :)

In the evening we would lay outside the house and look at the stars shining over us close as a blanket. Hunor loves to be in the woods again and listening to the river every night could make me trade in the sea for sometime too. We were both excited to be in nature and grasped every minute of it. 

The river and the fireplace are addictive indeed. I tried to spend as much time with both, as I could. 

Yakushima is famous all over Japan (and maybe even abroad) for the cartoon tales of Miyazaki Hayao, especially Mononoke Hime. 

That cartoon was inspired by Yakushima's forests. Also, there is an enormous cedar tree, the Jomon sugi that is said to be seven thousand years old. We didn't go to see that tree because it is a big tourist attraction and after spending years in Japan we know what that means here: crowds of people, heaps of cameras and tons of rails. We chose a less-well known path that a friend advised us, leading up to another big tree, Ryujin sugi (the name means Dragon God Cedar tree) maybe not seven thousand, but two thousand years old, still enough to feel evanescent and tiny standing in awe in front of him or hugging as much as we could reach: a small part of the trunk. We met only one person on the whole trail, other that that we had the forest for ourselves,It was a rather tough hike uphill, but very rewarding too. Monkeys and deer observed us curiously as we passed them by. At one turn we were surprised by a cloud. Standing among the trees, looking at the white haze passing by the leaves and filling everything around us all of a sudden turned the sight into an enchanted forest.

On the morning of our departure we bid the river and the inhabitants of the forest farewell. Leaving the village, it rained for the first time in the ten days we spent at Yakushima. A short shower and the sun shone again. Mr Tetsuka was driving us to the port when his wife called: there is a beautiful rainbow in the sky above Shirakoyama . I am sure it is Yakushima saying farewell to Teodora and Hunor.