FŪDO 風土 — How Climate Becomes Culture in Japan

fūdo — why this place is what it is

This is subarctic Japan — Ainu land, where winters sink below −25°C. The Ainu named the mountain Atosa-nupuri, “the naked mountain”: too much sulfur for trees to grow. The town below pipes the volcano’s heat into its baths and its homes. Culture here is geothermal.

The ground is alive. Steam hisses from a thousand yellow-crusted vents, and the smell of sulfur follows you back to Kawayu Onsen, a quiet hot-spring town fed by this very mountain. Stand close enough, and you can hear the earth breathe.

fūdo — why this place is what it is

Aomori spends half the year under some of the heaviest snow of any city on Earth — roughly eight metres of it. Nebuta is what that long patience looks like the moment it lets go: the shortest, loudest summer in Japan, six nights that end on Risshū — the old calendar’s first day of autumn.

For six nights in early August, Aomori hands its streets over to demons and gods. Nebuta floats — washi paper stretched over wire, lit from within — surge through the crowd while haneto dancers leap and chant “Rassera!”. The floats are rebuilt from scratch every single year. No photograph is loud enough. I tried anyway.

fūdo — why this place is what it is

The cold Oyashio current runs down this ria coast, keeping the water bracing even in August — and richly stocked. For generations the women of these inlets have free-dived for sea urchin and abalone on a single held breath. The current sets the harvest; the harvest built a culture led by its divers, the ama.

The shoreline folds into cliffs and coves, and somewhere under the green water the ama are working — a breath, a plunge, a thin whistle of air on the way back up. Kuji calls itself the village of the sea-women. I came for the rock and stayed for the sound of that breathing.

fūdo — why this place is what it is

This was a relay station on the Aizu-Nishi road, deep in snow country — up to two metres of it a winter. The thick thatched roofs are an answer to that snow: steep enough to shed it, heavy enough to hold the heat in. The village kept its Edo form because the weather, and the mountains, held the modern world at arm’s length.

Two rows of thatched houses face each other across a single dirt street, water running in open channels down both sides. In late autumn the eaves hang with drying persimmons; by January the roofs wear a metre of snow. Order the negi-soba and eat it, as they do here, with one whole leek for a spoon.

fūdo — why this place is what it is

Kōbō Daishi chose this ring of eight peaks in 816 for a reason: a cool, mist-pooled basin 800 metres up, cut off enough to hold a thousand years of esoteric Buddhism. The mountain keeps the weather — and the dead. Okunoin’s cedar avenue shelters more than 200,000 graves under near-perpetual fog.

Cloud sits in the cedars most mornings and the whole town smells of incense and wet wood. I walked the two kilometres of Okunoin at dusk, lanterns coming on between the tombs, and reached the hall where they still carry the master two meals a day — because here he is not dead, only meditating.

fūdo — why this place is what it is

The warm Kuroshio loads this coast with rain — the Kii Peninsula is among the wettest places in Japan — and the rain made the forest, the waterfalls, and the gods. Nachi’s 133-metre fall has been worshipped as a deity in its own right since before there were temples to set beside it. Here faith is, quite literally, weather falling.

The pilgrim paths of Kumano climb through cedar and moss-slick stone, and they all seem to end at falling water. At Nachi the three-storey pagoda and the cataract stand in a single frame, vermilion against a white thread of river. Standing in the spray, I understood why people once walked for weeks to call this place holy.

fūdo — why this place is what it is

This is one of the most active volcanoes on Earth, and half a million people live in its ashfall. Kagoshima sweeps the grey from its streets like snow, grows sweet daikon and tiny oranges in the volcanic soil, and raises umbrellas against ash, not rain. To live here is to make a daily peace with the mountain.

Sakurajima smokes the way other mountains sit still — a plume by breakfast, a low rumble by night. A ferry crosses to it in fifteen minutes; on the far side, lava fields from the 1914 eruption run down to the sea, and a shrine torii stands buried to its crossbar in ash. The south of Japan ends in fire.