This cultivated landscape is called the satoyama, a traditional Japanese agricultural system that dates back at least three thousand years. Here farmland and managed forests merge with grasslands and rice paddies, forming a mosaic of habitats that have long nourished humans and wildlife alike.

TWENTY MILES NORTHWEST OF TOKYO lies Sayama Hills, an oasis of greenery amid one of the most densely populated areas on Earth. The great spirit of the forest turns, gazes through, moves on.

Its silhouette is that of a creature with antlers that resemble a coral crown. The space slowly brightens with a golden light. As he kneels to draw water from a pool, the camera holds still on a gap in the distance between two trees. Soon he is accompanied by many kodamas, one for every tree, all clack-clattering in chorus, leading him to a safe clearing. The exiled prince stands at the mouth of the Great Forest and asks permission for entry from a kodama, a doll-like tree spirit. There is no going back for any of them.Īnd yet the film creates space for the old ways to survive. The guardians of the Great Forest resign themselves to making last stands. A leader of a new and just society razes the countryside to fuel her vision. A girl raised by wolves knows only revenge against those plundering her forest home. Princess Mononoke is a tale of diminishment: A prince from the last of the Indigenous Emishi tribe is forced to wander the world. As vast tracts of forest were felled for charcoal to feed iron smelters, the once venerated animalistic deities were driven from their lands. Set during the late Muromachi period (1392–1573), the film documents a time of great social and technological upheaval in Japan. In his project pitch for the film, Miyazaki explains how a conflict that pits humanity against nature cannot have a happy ending: any form of victory is by definition Pyrrhic. Nature’s struggle against the inexorable march of progress is given faces, voices, forms: demon boars and giant wolves, shadowy apes and chimeric deer gods, each wrathful and despondent to human encroachment. It is the space that inspired filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki in the crafting of Princess Mononoke, his 1997 environmental epic in which humanity wages war against the Great Forest and the divine gods of nature. As one of Japan’s oldest forests, the Shiratani Unsuikyo ravine serves as a grand cathedral and sanctuary for the more-than-human world. As absence becomes presence, the woods cultivate their own ambience, seeming to convey a core tenet of the Japanese concept of Shinto, which holds that the world is suffused with kami, sacred essences that embody things both living and inorganic. Even the ear may strain for signals, for sound does not come often or travel far under the dense canopy. Bright blooms and quick movements have no place in this primeval space-green and evergreen is all the eye can discern. The Shiratani Unsuikyo ravine is a mossy-covered primary-growth nature reserve populated with thousand-year-old yakusugi, or endemic Japanese cedars. ON THE ISLAND OF YAKUSHIMA in southern Japan lies a forest whose wellspring of awe arises from silence. Listen to each section read by the author.

Miyazaki tree spirits