Basics to enjoy Yokohama Citizen Forest

Hi, there, 

So here are some basics to enjoy the Forest, according to my experience. ;-)

Attire

Yokohama is a city, but Citizen Forest is a country-side. So, don’t come with your pin heels to the forest, but with the most comfortable walking shoes. Some places even beg mountain shoes to walk. All in all, the attire in a Citizen Forest is for hiking. For example,

What to bring

A.  Map

When available, I link each report of a Forest to the official site for its map (though it is in Japanese). You can download it from there. For hard copies, each City Ward Office distributes the maps of Citizen Forests (er, well, in Japanese). It would be worth visiting them. Also, some large Citizen Forests have Administrative Office that serves as a Visitor Center where we can have the maps as well.

B. Compass

In case you’ve lost your way in a dark forest, having a compass could be useful. For your Japanese shopping experience …

Lots of Choices here and there ...

By the way, carrying a compass even around Tokyo Station might be a wise move. When in March 11, 2011 the Great Tohoku Earthquake made metropolitan Tokyo dark, many people had to figure out which way home where familiar scenes of neon-signs and traffic lights disappeared. Knowing the direction of your way is always useful even in a urban jungle.

C. Food and trash bags

It is very easy to find a convenience store just next to an entrance of the Forest.

Lawson Near Miho Forest

But, inside, no shop or cafe. BBQ is prohibited either. Bring your own packed lunch and lots of drinks. There are no trash-bins in the forest. All the garbage must be removed by ourselves.

D. Toiletries with towels

The majority of Citizen Forests have picnic areas with benches and toilets.

In Bugenji Forest

Normally toilets have toilet papers, but the washing basins lack soap and towels in general. Japanese drugstores, Tokyu Hands, Don Quijote, Muji, or Lofts, have cute portable soap and hand-sanitizing products. Some of them are called Kami-sekken (paper soap, or soap films).

At Tokyu Hands, that blue package is Kami-sekken. Next to them are portable soaps in tube.

At Muji. Middle 2 tubes are hand-sanitiser and cream soap, respectively. Kami-sekken is in 2 rows on the right of the tubes. Muji’s version is with a refill option; it’s a good idea!

The other is “soap tablet.”

Actually, these tiny soaps can be used for washing our entire body so that using them only for hands can be overkill.

Come to think of it, we can use small bottles for carrying liquid soap.

Enjoy your shopping!

What (not) to do in the Forest

If you are a trail-runner, the Forests provide an ideal training ground. On the other hand, off-road running/biking is prohibited in the Citizen Forest. Please do not deviate from the provided road in the forest; both side of the promenade is full of fauna and flora that should be preserved. Your shoes and foot of your dog attached with alien matters could damage the forest. i.e. We must keep the lead to the dogs in the forest.

In the same spirit, please do not take away any of those ferns or animals you find cute there. They are the part of the Citizen Forest. Everybody must be able to enjoy their company at their forest home … What is for sure is, thanks to the endeavor of citizens of Yokohama, the natural habitat of Citizen Forests becomes more and more rich and attractive to many forms of theft. People are saying professionals come to the Citizen Forest, collect their bounty, and run away via Yokohama IC of Expressways. (True, some of the Parks are just 20 minutes car ride from Ginza.) The city and the police are receiving many reports such as “This morning, we have found our beautiful colony of orchids has gone,” or “It seems to us last night, somebody came to catch all the identified larvae of rare butterflies by cutting the known bushes of their habitat in such-a-such corner of the Forest.” Some Parks have prepared “Yellow Card” notice for visitors asking to call the offices if we find something fishy during our stroll. I’ll tell you the relevant phone numbers for each Park.

Yellow Card from Niiharu Forest

Also, no loud music or commotion such as playing ball games in Yokohama Citizen Forest, please. Yokohama is a big city. Right next to a Citizen Forest is often an ordinary residential area where loud noise is a taboo.

By the way, basically Citizen Forests do not have official parking space. (Though some have small “unofficial” parking lots open only for weekends thanks to the understanding of the neighbors of the Forest.) Let’s enjoy punctuality of Japanese public transport system to visit Yokohama Citizen Forest!

Safety

Forest is a dark place when there is no sunshine. A Citizen Forest is open from sun rise till sun set.

From around May to the end of October, there could be nests of hornets in Yokohama Citizen Forests. During the season, it is common for us to hear local news saying that groups of people are attacked by hornets in the Citizen Forests.

Wasp nest

So, if you encounter them issuing a peculiar menacing sound, leave the place ASAP. Their territory is about 10m of diameter from their nest. It is often said that perfume and black garment enhance the aggressiveness of wasps; a moral of the story is, you do not have to be cool in Yokohama Citizen Forest. In case you are assaulted by them, call 119 (emergency rescue number in Japan) immediately and leave the place promptly towards the nearby road accessible for vehicles. Carrying Epinephrine autoinjector could be a good idea.

During summer, Gloydius blomhoffii (mamushi) slithers actively in the fields and forests of Yokohama (whether it is Citizen Forest or not).

Mamushi

Its bite can be lethal. The best protection against mamushi is walking with sound. In the supply stores of mountaineering in Japan, we can buy bells to issue warnings to mamushi (and bear).

But if we make sound when walking with walking sticks or the like, it would be enough to tell mamushi that we are approaching. Mamushi is a gentle creature. They do not attack us unless we make them surprise. Anyway, don’t deviate from the promenade in the Citizen Forests. That bush beyond the corner ahead of you could be home for venomous vipers. In case you are bitten, call 119 and take a rest at the place; when you move around, your heart pumps the venom all over your body. The standard treatment of a bite is an injection of medical serum within 6 hours of the incident. Citizen Forest is not that big. Call 119, and tell the rescuer exactly where you are (… preferably in Japanese).

For your lawyers …

The official rules of the usage of Yokohama Citizen Forest横浜市市民の森の利用に関する要綱can be found here (in Japanese, so sorry …).

In short, it says,

<Rules of Yokohama Citizen Forest>

Before entering the Forest

ü  Wear clothes (including shoes, bag, and hat/cap) suitable for trekking.

ü  Bring your own drinks and foods.

Field Manners

ü  No ball games.

ü  Preserve quietness of the forest.

ü  Do not remove/bring in fauna and/or flora.

ü  Keep the lead of your pet.

ü  The park can be entered only between sun rise and sun set.

ü  Take home your trash.

ü  Keep the designated route; do not deviate into the habitat of the forest.

ü  No usage of fire in whatever form.

ü  Do not trash.

Let’s enjoy our adventure, then! ^o^

Welcome to Yokohama, my home town!

Welcome to Yokohama, my home town!

Yokohama is a port city, which means we have lots of hills and steep slopes. It keeps presenting surprising micro-sceneries just when we reach to the top of long steps. One ordinary residential area suddenly reveals a forest over there.

City of Yokohama has a scheme to preserve greeneries of the city with Green Tax, 900 yen per every resident as of March 2015, and preferential tax arrangements to landlords. When landlords allow their fields and forests accessible for their neighbors as a park by leasing it to the city (often by a renewable 10 years contract),  the city provides goodies like preferential annual and inheritance tax bills and constructs promenades and amenities like toilets and picnic tables in the forest. The landlord and his/her neighbors create a volunteers’ network to maintain natural habitat of the land with regular cleaning and maintenance, with the grant funded by the Green Tax. The city also holds subsidized educational sessions to the citizens for enhancing the awareness of environmental issues of our neighbor. The fields/forests treated in this way are called “Yokohama Citizen Forest” 横浜市民の森 (Yokohama Shimin-no-mori).  For more information, you can read the activities of the City here (Japanese), here (Japanese) and here (English). 

Some of these Citizen Forests attach to temples and/or Shinto shrines. There, we can find deciduous broad-leaved forests with huge castanopsis or oak. They often carry an official plate saying “a special tree of City of Yokohama,” or “ of Kanagawa Prefecture.”

Registered Ginkgo Tree at Bugenji Forest

They are ancient and believed to maintain some semblance of old habitat from, say, 500 years ago before Edo (Tokyo) was a big city.

Yokohama is a new city. Before Commodore Matthew Perry pointed the American cannon of his ship to Edo Castle in 1853, it was a sleepy backwater of Edo, where only a handful of small fishing-farming villages scattered across the current municipal area. We can enjoy the remnants of such co-habitation of villagers and the hills in the other type of Citizen Forests, which is a so-called “satoyama.”

Satoyama Yato of Niiharu Forest

A direct translation of Satoyama is “village hills.” There, for generations, humans have planted and maintained utility vegetation deliberately among the original habitat and constructed rice paddies, fields and pastures around the hills for subsistence farming. Bamboos have been utilized as a provider of materials for equipment in kitchen and everywhere. In spring the shoots of bamboos were/are delicacy for traditional dishes. Sawtooth oak and Quercus serrata Thunb produce acorns for starch eaten by ancient Japanese (Johmon-Jin) 2,000 years ago, and then became materials for everyday tools, compost, and charcoal for cooking and home-heating until quite recently.

Now some Citizen Forests have seasonal events demonstrating traditional charcoal making and other daily lives using these trees. We can suddenly find rice paddies of vegetable patches in the middle of the Citizen Forests where a landlord still plants crops sometimes for educational supports to nearby schools, or for consumption of their family and friends.

Then, during World War II, the government of Japan strongly recommended to plant coniferous forests of cryptomeria japonica and chamaecyparis obtuse, claiming they could be the materials of weapons ... this was a stupid idea; the trees need 100 years to be large enough for construction materials. By the way, why did they think the war in 2050 could be fought with wooden ships? … Anyway, those trees are now ubiquitous in sato-yama. They provide solemn quietness of the forest, fitontsidy for meditation, some materials for house construction and furniture, and tons of pollens for hay fever. 

Here I just write my experience in Yokohama’s Citizen Forest. As of March 2015, there are 42 of them. I try to tell you how to go there and enjoy. Sometimes, it is really astonishing to find such a place just a 45-minutes metro ride from Shibuya’s dancing floor. Yokohama is a big city, but inside it has many country-sides.

Oh, by the way, all the photos I use will not show the faces of people. We Japanese are a shy bunch. Besides, the strict privacy law says no-no of usage of photos identifying a person without a permission of that person him/herself. But, there are lots of people enjoying the Citizen Forest. If you see us somewhere in the forest, please do not be surprised when we say hello with a smiling face to you. :-)