#satoyama

[neko-no-oto]

春はもうすぐ。

後ろには早咲きの桜、足元には福寿草。里山にも春が見え隠れしております。

Spring is just around the corner.

Early-blooming cherry blossoms stand behind us, and adonis flowers bloom at our feet. Signs of spring are beginning to appear in the foothills "Satoyama".

[magical-magyars]

上総大久保の大カーブを行く　2026.5.6　月崎駅～上総大久保駅

[koshigurajumy]

Jumy-M Satoyama / 花咲く里山

[probablyasocialecologist]

Before the people ate the rice, they cooked it over charcoal made chiefly from the konara and kunugi oaks. They coppiced a part of every hillside every fifteen to twenty years, cutting back a section of the trees to a few inches above ground. The woods were called the booga mori, the forests of sprouts, the sprout lands. As the trees grew back, different plants also sprouted among them, some brought in by birds or the wind, some from the dormant pool of seeds. It was not an impoverished landscape but as rich a land as the place has ever known. Where uncut woodlands have about 176 different species of plants living in them, the whole mosaic of the booga mori has 351. It is twice as diverse as an untouched forest. The tree roots stayed in the soil to hold the water and feed the springs. The trees quickly sprouted back. The cut wood went for firewood or for charcoal. (In 1940, the woods still yielded 2.7 million tons of charcoal.) The brushy tops might be kept for fire starter, used to dry sea salt, or even thrown into the water to make habitat for fish or oysters. Some of the trunks were cut into logs, each inoculated with mushrooms. Year by year, people would cut another section, so there were always parts of the woodland in different states of growth. It was a way to make edges, and edges within edges, multiplying the conditions in the landscape, so creatures that loved different habitats all could thrive. In the new-cut lands, the giant purple butterfly (now the national butterfly) lived, along with stag beetles and longhorn beetles, both prized as pets by children. Dragonflies cruised the paddies and the grasslands, straying into the open young forest. Rice fish, frogs, and freshwater molluscs inhabited the paddies. Bumble bees and wildflowers coevolved, so that the order of flowering and the shape of the flowers corresponded to the time when different bees and different bee life-stages were present. The flowers were long and wide when only the bumblebee queen was gathering pollen and short and fat when the smaller workers were out and about.

William Bryant Logan, Sprout Lands: Tending the Endless Gift of Trees

[jumy-m]

Jumy-M koinobori in satoyama / 里山を泳ぐ鯉のぼり

Happy Children’s Day! March 5th is “Boy’s festival / Children’s Day” in Japan. A carp streamer is a symbol of Boy’s festival.

[everydaymacro]

10/17　阿賀野市　「キノコ」

[urtopia]

Satoyama, near Shimada in Shizuoka prefecture

[nippon-com]

The Japanese word satoyama describes a landscape that lies between the natural and human worlds, an intermediate zone of forests, fields, and bustling communities. Containing both natural and human elements, they are havens for different kinds of life, including a wide array of insects.

Photos by Nagahata Yoshiyuki.