Places Reached Only by Continuing
In the south of Nara Prefecture, at the source of the Yoshino River, lies Kawakami Village. This village, set among layer upon layer of cedar- and cypress-covered mountains, is said to be where Yoshino forestry began, and it is documented that trees were already being planted by hand here around the year 1500, at the end of the Muromachi period. For some five hundred years since then, the people of these mountains have planted trees, raised them, and planted again, generation after generation.
The Yoshino way of planting is a little different from that of other places. Roughly eight to ten thousand seedlings are planted densely on each hectare, about twice the usual number. The trees grow straight upward, reaching for the light, and their lower branches fall away on their own, leaving trunks with few knots. Then, some fourteen or fifteen years after planting, the first thinning is carried out. A few trees are cut from where the stand is most crowded, just a little at a time, and this is repeated every few years, again and again. An old forestry book, the Yoshino Ringyo Zensho, speaks of thirteen thinnings by the hundredth year. Timber grown this way has fine, even growth rings, and from the middle of the Edo period, it was prized as wood for sake barrels.
About thirty minutes' climb up a narrow mountain path from the hamlet of Shimotako lies the Shimotako Village Forest. It is one of the oldest planted forests in Japan, where cedar and cypress thought to have been planted in the early Edo period, from two hundred and fifty to four hundred years old, stand side by side. One cedar among them, known as the Witness of History, is estimated to be four hundred and ten years old, with a trunk about 5.4 metres around, and it rises to a height of about fifty-five metres. Today, the forest can be visited only on a guided tour.
There is strength in continuing.
On the other hand, some point out that merely continuing aimlessly has no meaning.
Of course, it is not good when continuing becomes the goal in itself, and there is no substance behind it.
Even so, I would still say that continuing has meaning.
As you run, as you go along, you can improve the substance.
There are places you can reach only by continuing.
Standing in the forest, people find themselves looking up. The person who planted this cedar never saw it as it stands now. Nor did the many generations of mountain people who came every few years to thin the forest; each of them saw it only at one point along the way. Even so, for more than four hundred years, the cedar has added one growth ring a year to the outside of its trunk. And this year, too, right before the eyes of those who look up at it, it is quietly adding one more.