Kaori Shibo bent her head down and peered through a magnifying glass in a forest in central Japan, emitting a delighted gasp. The object of her adoration? Moss.
“Oh, this baby’s sporophyte is breaking out! I’ve never seen this before,” an enchanted Shibo, 41, shouted, her head nearly close enough to kiss a fallen tree log in the forest in Yatsugatake.
She was out on a stroll with about 20 other people who are part of a growing community in Japan obsessed with plants known as bryophytes, including moss, liverworts and hornworts.
Photo: AFP
“When you stare at a tiny, tiny piece of green, you find a vast world expanding from there,” fellow moss enthusiast Masami Miyazaki said.
“It’s like a micro universe,” Myazaki, 42, said.
The group was out exploring just days into Japan’s rainy season, perfect weather for an expedition to spot some of the many mosses, liverworts, hornworts and lichens thickly coating the forest’s trees and rocks.
The forest, which surrounds Shirakomanoike lake and spreads across the northern Yatsugatake mountain range, is a popular spot for microplant enthusiasts.
More than 500 varieties can be observed in the Yatsugatake mountain range alone, said Masanobu Higuchi, Japan’s leading bryology expert and the hike’s leader.
“I am infatuated by moss not just because of their pretty shapes and colors,” Shibo said. “I am transported by the fact that you can find them anywhere around you, but never realize how magnificent they are.”
In recent years, moss enthusiasts have multiplied in Japan, with hikes catering to those eager to spot different varieties and shops selling the plants in terrariums well-suited to small Japanese homes.
The Northern Yatsugatake Moss Association began organizing moss-viewing hikes in 2011, which attracted about 40 people over the year.
However, this year, 140 people scored tickets to the association’s hikes, which are held each month until October, with demand outstripping the number of spots available.
Moss has been popular with traditional Japanese gardeners for centuries and the plants grow well in the country’s humid climate.
“A beautiful natural landscape that is taken and compacted, that is the essence of Japanese gardens,” said Chisao Shigemori, a prominent Japanese garden designer.
Speaking to reporters at the carefully groomed Japanese garden at Kyoto’s Tofukuji temple, he said that moss is considered the best ground-covering plant for such traditional settings because it helps replicate natural landscapes in miniature.
“The landscape of mountains and contrasting densities of green can be all expressed by moss,” he said.
At the temple, much of the garden is covered with juniper haircap, known as sugi-goke or cedar moss in Japanese.
The spiky stems resemble miniature cedar trees and the moss is very popular with Japanese garden designers.
While moss is a purely aesthetic pleasure for some Japanese, for others it is also big business.
Nicknamed the “Moss King,” 64-year-old Oichi Kiyomura spends most days digging through wild bushes, across slopes and even up cliffs, looking for moss that he can scoop into trays and sell to enthusiasts.
It is a far cry from his former career, running nightclubs, but Kiyomura, who is based in the mountains of Nikko, north of Tokyo, said that his moss business is lucrative.
He said that he makes at least ¥30 million (US$270,240) a year, hinting that it is a modest estimate.
His moss conversion came one day when he was out mushroom picking with a friend.
“It was something I had never expected, but I found a really beautiful community of moss, clustered in the shape of small domes. It was my first encounter with moss,” he said.
It was a type known locally as arahashiraga-goke, popular among bonsai farmers for its silk-like fine leaves.
“I thought there was no way that people would ignore something so beautiful if I started selling it,” he said.
He purchased vast lots of land, including some alongside a shuttered golf course left behind when Japan’s economic bubble burst and started gathering the microplants. He now sells to temples, traditional garden designers, bonsai farmers and terrarium hobbyists.
He has even developed a greening system that allows moss to be grown on building roofs in cities to help bring down temperatures.
Kiyomura acknowledged that some detractors find moss rather pedestrian and uninteresting, but he defended his obsession with the plants.
“I love moss, even more than women,” he joked. “I would live with it even if no one cared about it anymore.”
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
CARTEL ARRESTS: The president said that a US government operation to arrest two cartel members made it jointly responsible for the unrest in the state’s capital Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Thursday blamed the US in part for a surge in cartel violence in the northern state of Sinaloa that has left at least 30 people dead in the past week. Two warring factions of the Sinaloa cartel have clashed in the state capital of Culiacan in what appears to be a fight for power after two of its leaders were arrested in the US in late July. Teams of gunmen have shot at each other and the security forces. Meanwhile, dead bodies continued to be found across the city. On one busy street corner, cars drove
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to