Green Forest Museum

6 June '16

On Monday we visited our second maintained forest, the Saitama Green Forest Museum.  It extends between Saitama ken (prefecture) and Tokyo.  Because the 85 hectacre forest (11km east to west and 4km north to south) reaches five cities and one town, it takes the collaborative effort of all six to keep the forest maintained.  The areas managed by Tokyo and Saitama do differ, however, in that the Tokyo area is much "cleaner" while the Saitama area of the forest museum tries to keep things more natural, yet still managed.

We got to take a walk around (some of) the facility before lunch.  Here are some beautiful sculptures from tree stumps.

Look at this beautiful satoyama!  These two pictures show what previously was rice fields only 50 years ago.  Once void of trees, it has been restored to its natural state.

Here is one of the workers at the forest that showed us around.  To the left of him is a red pine, which can thrive in surpentine soils like the one here.  The facility does not have enough staff and volunteers to keep every part of the forest maintained, so some places like this one just go completely au naturale.  Some of the bamboo forests are not maintained either, but make good hiding spots for animals to keep the area populated with fauna.

I didn't get any pictures of us working, just all the beautiful nature, but we weeded an area with sickles and saws.  They weed the area twice a year and eventually, the weeds will just stop growing back.  This facilty does not use chemicals or large & loud machinery.  Even the area that is reserved for rice cultivation is used for education, as they do everything by hand and teach the ways that rice was originally farmed.   Students and community members alike can come to the Green Forest and help maintain the facility as well as gain knowledge about forest management.

One of the ways in which they manage the forest is with a technique called coppicing.  If a tree becomes overgrown or unhealthy, you can cut it close to the base, eventually it will grow back up again from there.  Coppicing is a technique used to also just indefinitely extend the life of healthy trees as long as the process is continued regularly and responsibly.  Every three years they assess the growth and choose specific sprigs to continue growing, and trim the rest.  In this specifc forest, we got to observe the benefits of coppicing.  A tree that had been grown after coppice that was four years old was about three times as tall as a tree that had been planted new, which was nine years old.  If they were the same age, the coppice tree would be approximately six times as tall as a tree that had been planted from a seed or sappling.  Pretty neat.

http://www.treesurgeryoldham.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/images12.jpg

For dinner that night, we went to a sushi restaurant.  You get prizes for eating a lot so our table (5 people) ate 65 plates.  Every five plates (you slide them into a little slot at the end of the table that sends them back to the kitchen) you get a chance to win a little prize.  We only one twice but got some little food keychains!  Kawaii!

Almost have all the posts up,

Anna