The Japanese priest and his parishioners gathered before dawn, hoping that climate change had not robbed them of the chance to experience an increasingly rare communion with the sacred.
The few dozen men, most in their 60s, were headed to Nagano’s Lake Suwa in search of a phenomenon called “God’s Crossing” that has gone from reliable to elusive in recent decades.
Known as miwatari in Japanese, it occurs when a crack opens up in the frozen lake surface, allowing shards of thinner ice to break through and form a ridge where local deities are believed to cross.
Kiyoshi Miyasaka, the priest of Yatsurugi Shrine, shows part of a centuries-old archive describing winter conditions of Lake Suwa and miwatari crossings in the office of the shrine in Suwa city, Nagano Prefecture, Japan, on Jan. 29. Photo: AFP
For centuries, the priest of the nearby Yatsurugi Shrine has led an annual watch for the crossing, contributing to a unique record of a changing climate.
This year’s watch began on Jan. 5, with Kiyoshi Miyasaka — a priest in Japan’s Shinto religion — leading the flock.
One man carried a worn flag, another a giant axe. All wore jackets bearing the shrine’s crest.
Photo: AFP
They set out with hope, despite a seven-year stretch in which the God’s Crossing has not appeared once.
“This is the start of the decisive 30 days,” Miyasaka told them.
As they neared the water, dark and choppy in the pre-dawn light, Miyasaka’s staple smile disappeared.
“How pitiful,” he said, lowering a thermometer into the water.
Miyasaka’s predecessors noted when the entire lake surface froze, and when the miwatari appeared.
More recently, priests have added temperature readings and ice thickness.
Consecutive records date all the way back to 1443, although the shrine’s priests only took over the job in 1683.
“The chronicle shows data taken at a single location over hundreds of years, and thanks to it, we can now see what the climate was like centuries ago,” said Naoko Hasegawa, a geographer at Tokyo’s Ochanomizu University.
“We find no other meteorological archive comparable to it,” she told reporters. “Global researchers who study climate history see it as a very valuable set of observation records.”
The God’s Crossing has not appeared since 2018, an absence that both scientists and believers attribute to climate change.
“We are seeing the signs of climate change in many places of the world, and Lake Suwa is no exception,” Miyasaka said. “Nature doesn’t lie.”
Traditionally, the ice ridges were believed to represent the path of a god crossing the lake to visit his goddess wife.
Scientists explain them a little differently.
They appear if the lake surface freezes entirely, which requires several days below minus-10°C.
The ice lid contracts and expands with temperature fluctuations between night and day, opening cracks that fill with shards of newly frozen lake water.
They crash against each other, producing a distinctive roaring sound, and sometimes rise to eye level.
Takehiko Mikami, who has studied the phenomenon with Hasegawa, remembers seeing it in 1998.
“The surface froze completely to about 15cm thick. We could walk all the way across the lake to the other shore,” the professor emeritus at Tokyo Metropolitan University said.
His research shows the crossing appeared almost every winter until the 1980s, but since then morning temperatures have often failed to fall enough for the lake to freeze over.
“This is a warning from nature,” Mikami said.
For a time, this year’s season brought hope.
On Jan. 26, after weeks of frigid dawn observations, Miyasaka and his flock recorded a full freeze, smiling in delight as a chunk of ice was carved for the priest to measure.
However, the surface melted days later before the God’s Crossing could appear.
On Feb. 4, Miyasaka once again declared an “open sea” or ake no umi, meaning little chance one would appear before spring.
It marks eight years without a sighting, tying the longest “godless” period on record in the early 16th century.
However, Mikami doubts the documentation of that time, and suspects we might now be living through the longest absence.
What is certain is that full freezes of the lake surface are now the exception rather than the rule, as they were for centuries.
When the crossing appears, Yatsurugi’s priest holds a Shinto ritual on the ice, something Miyasaka has been able to do just 11 times in more than four decades in the job.
However, he treasures the tradition, and the record he is leaving behind.
“We will report it was a season of ‘open sea,’ passing on the message to people 100 years from now,” he said.
For Mikami, the god’s long absence is a warning that “global warming is accelerating.”
“If the trend continues, I am afraid we will never see the miwatari phenomenon again,” he said.
An American scientist convicted of lying to US authorities about payments from China while he was at Harvard University has rebuilt his research lab in Shenzhen, China, to pursue technology the Chinese government has identified as a national priority: embedding electronics into the human brain. Charles Lieber, 67, is among the world’s leading researchers in brain-computer interfaces. The technology has shown promise in treating conditions such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and restoring movement in paralyzed people. It also has potential military applications: Scientists at the Chinese People’s Liberation Army have investigated brain interfaces as a way to engineer super soldiers by boosting
Indonesian police have arrested 13 people after shocking images of alleged abuse against small children at a daycare center went viral, sparking outrage across the nation, officials said on Monday. Police on Friday last week raided Little Aresha, a daycare center in Yogyakarta on Java island, following a report from a former employee. CCTV footage circulating on social media showed children, most younger than two, lying on the floor wearing only diapers, their hands and feet bound with rags. The police have confirmed that the footage is authentic. Police said they also found 20 children crammed into a room just 3m by 3m. “So
A grieving mother has ended her life at a clinic in Switzerland four years after the death of her only child. Wendy Duffy, 56, a physically healthy woman, died at the Pegasos clinic in Basel after struggling to cope with the death of her 23-year-old son, Marcus. The former care worker, from the West Midlands, England, had previously attempted to take her own life. The case comes as assisted dying would not become law in England and Wales after proposed legislation, branded “hopelessly flawed” by opponents, ran out of time. Ruedi Habegger, the founder of Pegasos, described Duffy’s death as
From post offices and parks to stations and even the summit of Mount Fuji, Japan’s vending machines are ubiquitous, but with the rapid pace of inflation cooling demand for their drinks, operators are being forced to rethink the business. Last month beverage giant DyDo Group Holdings announced it would remove about 20,000 vending machines — about 7 percent of their stock nationwide — by January next year, to “reconstruct a profitable network.” Pokka Sapporo Food & Beverage, based in Nagoya, also said last month it would sell its 40,000-machine operation to Osaka-based Lifedrink Co. “The strength of the vending machine
RSS