How Green Is Our Valley in Downtown: Jingashita Valley Park of Yokohama 陣ヶ下渓谷公園

In Yokohama, we have only one place with name containing “Valley.” It is Jingashita Valley 陣ヶ下渓谷, next to Nishiya Water Treatment Plant 西谷浄水場 in Hodogaya Ward 保土ヶ谷区. The place is one of the sources of Katabira River 帷子川. I personally think Jingashita Valley is not that large for a valley, but more of a ravine. The stream in Hitorizawa Citizen Forest 氷取沢市民の森  that is the water source for Ohoka River 大岡川 has a similar, or even larger, size, surrounded by 700ha of the South Forest of Yokohama. And Hitorizawa is not awarded a name of valley. It’s unfair! Even though, Yokohama people in the know sometimes incant “Jingashita Valley” with a sort of pride … “Look, our mega-city can keep a “valley” as such!” Maybe, it’s like Todoroki Valley 等々力渓谷 in Setagaya Ward 世田谷区 of Tokyo: in the ocean of congested houses and buildings with not-much greenery, a narrow forest running along a short stream is miraculously allowed to preserve trees. Neighbors love the place perhaps because of such preciousness ... OK, Jingashita Valley Park is definitely larger than Todoroki Valley with more vegetation. It certainly has its own charm. This week is about my short strolling in the only “Valley” in Yokohama.

Trash-floating Todoroki Valley in Tokyo.
Even though it was a cloudy day, the scenery was too dark.
They could thin the vegetation
for more healthy forest, if they choose.
I know Tokyokko don’t want to
because if they let the sunshine in to the ravine,
the rows of houses and buildings become so obvious
behind a very narrow green curtain.

Jingashita Valley.
Granted, it was a fine day
unlike that’s for Todoroki Valley above.
But our forest is definitely more substantial
than for Tokyo.

The fact that Jingashita Valley Park is surrounded by tightly packed housings makes finding a way to go there a bit tricky, despite of its location next to the downtown of Yokohama. If you go there by car, first find your way to Nishiya Water Treatment Plant of the City of Yokohama. This place is the brain of Yokohama’s water supply structure so that any navigation system will reply your search with the easiest route for you. Then, locate Nishihara Danchi Condo Complex 西原団地 next to the Plant. The community has a public parking in east, which works as a parking for Jingashita Valley Park as well. If you use public transportation, the nearest bus stop to the Park is at Johsuijo-ura 浄水場裏 stop in front of the Nishiya Water Treatment Plant. The services to the stop are Sotetsu Hama-16 (between Sotetsu Wadamachi 和田町駅and Tsurugamine Stations 鶴ヶ峰駅, time tables are here and here) and Hama 19 (between Sotetsu Wadamachi Station and Shin-Sakuragaoka Danchi Condo Complex 新桜ヶ丘団地, time table from Wadamachi Station is here). From the bus stop, walk to the west along the Plant, turn right at the first corner, and walk straight for about 100m along the training facility for Yokohama FC. On the left you find a city garden with paved steps. Please go down there and walk past the rows of detached houses for about 200m. You’ll meet with a busy flyover of Loop Road 2 (Kan-ni 環2) of the city, and find a small tunnel below it. Go through the tunnel and there is a small road going to the forest in front of you. That’s  the south entrance of Jingashita Valley Park.

Nishiya Water Treatment Plant.
Actually this place is deeply connected
with the largest forest owned by the city of Yokohama.
More to it in my later posts.

Public Parking next to Nishihara Danchi Condo Complex

A public toilet in the parking is the only toilet for Jingashita Park.
Please do not miss your chance!

The main gate for Yokohama FC training center

Please go down these steps of the garden …

The other side of the tunnel

The south gate of Jingashita Valley Park

The third access to the Jingashita Park is from Sotetsu Kamihoshikawa Station 上星川駅. Leave the station from its South Exit, and find the way to the pedestrian road along the north riverside of Katabira River. Keep on walking along the river, and you’ll find a small sign saying “Jingashita Valley Park, this way.” The road eventually goes around a large condo next to a small temple, Zuiryuin Temple 随流院, and you’ll find huge flyover of Loop Road 2 ahead of you. Just try to reach under the Loop Road that has a children’s playground. Go pass the playground and turn left immediately to a community road running along (and below) the Loop Road. Ahead of you is a forest along the Loop Road with an entrance to the Jingashita Park. If you take this route to the Park, you’ll meet immediately Jingashita Valley on your right, and the Loop Road on the left. The Loop Road flyover above you is designed to maintain forest’s soil. Here, inbound and outbound of the Loop Road are separated for the trees to poke out. Japan Society of Civil Engineers awarded the design of Jingashita Viaduct 2001 Tanaka Prize and 2003 Civil Engineering Design Grand Prize. In August, the trekking road below the Viaduct is decorated with flowering wild grasses that can thrive with limited sun light. The route and the stream eventually turn right to say goodbye to the Loop Road and start to climb.

South exit of Kamihoshikawa Station

Please take this road along Katabira River, and

There is this notice “This way to Jingashita Valley Park.”

We can find roofs of Zuiryuin Temple over there.

The playground. Just cross it to the other side.

Turn left, and go ahead.

Here it is. Another entrance to Jingashita Valley Park.

Award winning structure and the route in Jingashita Park

Flowers below the Viaduct 1:
Pollia japonica

Flowers below the Viaduct 2: Astilbe odontophylla

Unless you dare go off-road (hey, off-road is a huge no-no for the micro eco-system protection), the route in Jingashita Valley Park is simple. Please refer to the photo of the map below. If you enter the Park from Kamihoshikawa Station under the Viaduct, when you reach to the inside of the forest, you’ll soon meet with a small gate that leads us to the ravine itself. Weather permitting and applying suitable insect repellent, the place becomes a family-fun place to enjoy nature of water front. Warning: do not try walking the ravine. Around the gate is normally well-taken care of by the Park Office. But once you leave from the spot, there could be sudden falls of boughs and trees from above. In addition, the riverbed is slippery and sometimes very steep (; people call the place “valley”) where an uninitiated can easily suffer serious injury or death. The Park Office situates the notice boards of “Do Not Enter from Here” around the gate. You’d better follow their direction.

The map of Jingashita Valley Park.
Walking along the Viaduct is along the road
from the north east of this drawing.

The signpost on the route coming from the Viaduct

A bit of climbing from the Viaduct leads us these picnic benches.
Inside the park,
there are lots of chairs and picnic benches like these.

The gate for the ravine

Could you see the sign “Do Not Enter from Here”
on the right of this photo?
Please follow their advice.

If the water is not so high,
we can just cross the ravine, keeping our foot dry.

The forest along the ravine is a combo of afforested Cryptomeria japonica and fire woods, dotted by wild broad leaved trees typical in Yokohama. Styrax japonicas, Acuba japonica, Cornus controversa, Neolitsea sericea … The trekking road goes down to the ravine keeps the charm of standard mountain road, with steep ups and downs. In contrast, the route in thick line of the map is a paved road where volunteers put name plates of trees and other signs for the visitors. Coniferous trees have a blue emblem, and broad leaves are with an orange badge. They are to explain kids the difference between these 2 kinds. Some plates have a poetic suggestion like “Where is sun here?” We look above and enjoy the twinkle of sun light coming from the canopy. Some says “Please open this gently” and we find small creatures living underneath. Though some of these signs are wore-off, many of them are still helpful for urbanites to learn the way to enjoy natural forest. If you train yourself in the Jingashita Valley Park for running you can complete the route in less than 20 minutes, and I’ve met several runners when I’ve been there in one weekend. The place deserves the pride of Yokohama. “Our mega-city has a beautiful Valley next to the downtown!”

The way from the ravine is like this.

But we soon reach to the paved route.

Such chairs are dotted in the forest.

Near the Parking

This exhibition in the parking explains
the meaning of signs within the forest.

If you find a problem in the Jingashita Valley Park, please make a contact with

Office for the Park Greeneries in the North 北部公園緑地事務所

Yokohama Municipal Government Creative Environment Policy Bureau 横浜市環境創造局

Phone: 045-311-2016 (I guess in Japanese only)

FAX: 045-316-8420 (I hope there is somebody who can read English …)

A Summer Holiday: Joining a workshop for 10th Art Exhibition in the Forest of Yokohama

As I reported in my June 2^nd post, this year 2017 Laboratory of the Forest is made of 6 series of workshops and an exhibition (September 10-24) of the installations created during the workshops. The place of the event is the forest attached to the site for this year’s National Urban Greenery Fair 全国都市緑化フェア that is planned to be a part of Yokohama Zoorasia Botanical Park. The final workshops will be held on September 2^nd (“Sleeping in the forest”) and 10^th (“Forest Cathedral”). The concept of this year’s exhibition by the GROUP the Creation and Voice of the Woods 創造と森の声 is letting the process of creating installations a part of exhibition for anybody to come and enjoy in the forest. On September 10^th, making Forest Cathedral is expected to be completed by installing transparent color panels made of plastic films spread over gaps between twigs. By that date, all the installations for the 10^th Exhibition is ready for audience. The twiggy dancers created during the first workshop last May for the Greenery Fair have moved there to join with the other works. One summer Sunday, I visited one of these activities for the Forest Cathedral. That was a fun! I tell you my experience with the people of the GROUP for Art Exhibition in the Forest of Yokohama. What I helped was preparing “Forest Cathedral” to be ready for plastic films.

Dancing twigs are moved from Urban Greenery Fair site.

The GROUP people thinned young Quercus myrsinifolia in the forest and used them to “build” a hexagonal pergola. The leaves of cut trees were removed but many of their twigs were left as such. Then, they erected “pillars” at each corner of roughly 7m diameter hexagon with 2-3 processed Quercus myrsinifolia. The tips of trees are twined at the top so that when the pillars were raised, the hexagonal pergola had beams of boughs at around 3-4m above. During the workshop on September 10, the participants are making color panels with plastic films and Y-shaped smaller twigs for max 30cm wide. The panes they create will fill the gap between the boughs.  When it’s done, the visitors in the pergola can look up the “canopy” where sunshine penetrates through colorful transparent films, which is expected to give a feel of stained glasses in a cathedral. To install color panels in the ceiling, the GROUP is planning to combine panels at the ground and use pulley to rift them up, but the lower gaps are expected to be filled by panes with twines and cable ties. When I joined their activity, the pergola was already built but the lower parts of the “canopy” had too wide gaps for color panels. My task was to create smaller spaces for the participants of 9/10 Workshop to fill the openings with their color panes.

A pile of thinned Quercus myrsinifolia

A sort of roof-top of the pergola

A prototype of color panels

The forest for the Exhibition is the property of the City of Yokohama. It’s a typical abandoned Satoyama forest where too old trees for fire logs, like Quercus acutissima and Quercus myrsinifolia, are freely scattering their seeds without human intervention. The GROUP told me the people of the city office said it was OK to “harvest” the materials for their art work from the forest so long as the activity was not dangerous. They cannot fell, say, a 20m tall Quercus serrata, but using ubiquitous young Quercus myrsinifolia is frankly welcome as a part of forest management. So, when I went there, they had a mountain of cut trees and branches. The first task was removing the leaves from the thinned trees and scattering them below the installation created during the Workshop 03 on July 28. That workshop, orchestrated by ASADA, was to create musical “instruments” in the forest. The art work was for anybody to bong the bamboos and jump on the wooden decks to create sounds in the forest. Inevitably kids used the installation as their playground and tumbling down from the platforms. The GROUP people decided to use the leaves removed for the Cathedral as natural cushions for kids to enjoy safely the art work. The morning I’ve been there were still misty in the forest. Plucking leaves to make a pile of cushions was actually very meditative. I tried the leafy ground in the middle of the process. It certainly returned gentler rebounds for legs. I hope my leaf-pulling can provide a safer space for kids …

Making natural cushions

Anybody can hop and jump
to create sounds there.

The leaf-less trees are then used to make the ceiling and walls of the Cathedral denser. First, I had to identify a gap that is too wide for color panes. Then, I chose a tree / bough / twig whose shape and size could provide an effect suitable for Y-shaped panels to fill the gap. Bringing a chosen material to the pergola and trying the branch to a gap, sometimes we found the size of the tree is too small/big to be twined to the pillar. Or the shape of the bough did not create an anticipated impression. I then had to return to the pile of leaf-less trees and restart selecting a material. When a tree was just right, the next task is attaching it to the post in a right angle securely enough to withstand average storms in Yokohama. “Tying at least 3 points would be a safer option, we guess,” Mr. Ishiyama of the GROUP advised me. Though the process required certain techniques to master during the process, and it surely takes time, I found it really a fun. I imagined what kind of color kids for 9/10 Workshop would choose for that particular space … then proceeded to the next hole. By the afternoon, the mist disappeared and a bit of sunlight came down between the taller canopies of the forest. Japonica saepestriata and Lethe sicelis were flying by when I was struggling with wires to secure the tree. That’s a kind of ideal way of spending a summer holiday.

A pile of material for art work

Mr. Ishiyama is tying a bough
to the beams.

The pergola is still too spacy
… more work is necessary.

The most frequent transportation services to the forest of the GROUP is to ride a bus either from JR Nakayama 中山 station or Sotetsu Tsurugamine 鶴ヶ峰 Station. There are the routes Asahi 11 and 15 both of which connect two stations. (From Nakayama, the time table is here. From Tsurugamine, the table is here.)  If you take a bus from Nakayama, get off the bus at Kohdan-Shukaijoh-mae 公団集会場前. If you turn right from the bus stop, beyond the traffic light, you’ll find a building looks like an old school. It is now-defunct Hikarigaoka Elementary School ひかりが丘小学校. If you ride a bus from Tsurugamine for Nishi-Hikarigaoka 西ひかりが丘, it actually takes you in front of this building at the bus stop, called Nishi-Hikarigaoka, the final stop. In any case, first you walk a bit to the direction of Hikarigaoka Elementary and turn left at the first corner from the Nishi-Hikarigaoka bus stop. Go straight. Eventually you enter a small, paved and steeply climbing-up road between the forest on the right and a retirement housing complex, Care Home Yokohama and Villa Yokohama, on the left. Pass the top of the hill seeing a downing slope on the left between the Care Home and Villa. At this point on the edge of the forest, there is a big banner saying “創造と森の声.” From there, keep on going 10m or so along the forest, and on the right we see the entrance for the workshop. Another bus route we can use is the bus to Zoorasia. Use Asahi 9 and 10 to Zoorasia of Sotetsu from Yokohama (time table, here) or from Tsurugamine (time tables, here and here) Stations. Sotetsu Bus has another service from Mitsukyo 三ツ境 Station with Asahi 33 and 34 (time table, here). There also is City Bus service Route 136 to Zoorasia from JR Nakayama Station (time table, here). Get off the bus at Yokohama Zoorasia, and proceed further along for about 400 m to the direction of #2 Parking of the Zoo. On the right, there will be a small gate with the sign GROUP the Creation and Voice of the Woods. If you visit the place during weekends, many Asahi 10, 33, 34 and Route 136 buses will take us to the North Gate of Zoorasia (terminal stop) that is the closest to the workshop entrance. When you leave the terminal stop of Zoorasia North Gate, go back a bit along the bus road, and on the left there is the sign for the GROUP.

The gate to the forest for the Exhibition from Zoorasia

The entrance to the place

The banner you’ll find if you come
from Nishi-Hikarigaoka bus stop

The art works created during the Workshops will be in the forest till 24^th of September, and dismantled in turn to disappear completely by the end of September. Please come and enjoy the installations in Yokohama’s forest, before they are gone.

If you find a problem in the site introduced in this post, the best contact address will be GROUP the Creation and Voice of the Woods.

www.facebook.com/SouzoutoMorinokoe1997

blog.goo.ne.jp/souzoutomorinokoe

e-mail: morinokoe7@yahoo.co.jp

The events also receives grants from Culture and Tourism Bureau of the City 横浜市文化観光局. The contact address of the Bureau is

Minatocho, Naka-ku, Yokohama, 231-0017
TEL：　045-671-3715　FAX：　045-663-5606

URL: http://www.city.yokohama.lg.jp/bunka/bunshin/torikumi/artsite/

Delight of Crimson Red: Cooking Japanese bayberry

For “bounty hunters in forests,” August is the month to have a rest in Yokohama and Kanagawa.  In Kanagawa’s forests during a final week of August, the autumn begins with chestnut gathering. Until then, collecting natural goodies is generally in a pause for about a month. Before entering the summer recess, there is a task representing the end of spring season. That’s to collect Japanese bayberries. Japanese bayberries, or Yamamomo (Myrica rubra), is medium sized broad-leaved evergreen native in semi-tropical area of East Asia. Kanagawa and Chiba prefectures are almost the northern limit of the range of Myrica rubra. They thrive even in poor soil so that our ancestors planted them along the coast lines or hot and dry mountain ridges. They are dioecious of understating flowers in March-April.  Then, for a brief period of late June - early July, established trees bear numerous crimson-red fruits. Although they look like strawberries, it is actually a stone fruit with knobby surface. They taste sweet and sour with lots of carotene and potassium (about ½ of the same weight of bananas). I think in metropolitan Tokyo the fruit is a sort of known only by aficionados.

Myrica rubra

In southern region of Japan, the tree is more common. Kochi 高知 and Tokushima 徳島 Prefectures in Shikoku Island 四国 designate Yamamomo as their prefectural flower (Kochi) or prefectural tree (Tokushima). Especially in Tokushima Prefecture, in the 17^th century Hachisuka samurai clan 蜂須賀家, the lord of Awa (Tokushima) Province 阿波国, ordered their samurai subordinates to plant the tree in their gardens and forests with the purpose of preventing soil erosion, and of substitute foods preparing for famine. As such, Japanese bayberries as fruits are the delicacy from Shikoku Island. But Kanagawa prefectural government also plants the trees in our parks along Shonan Beach. With a reasonable self-restraint, we can collect bayberries from the artificially planted trees in parks. Those who came from Shikoku Island trash the berries in Kanagawa. “Oh, those are shabby produce comparing with the fruits from my home town!” “My family’s Yamamomo is far sweeter.” Er, OK. Though, I think Yamamomo in Kanagawa’s parks are good enough to be tasty jam and other products. This week, I tell you how I prepared this year’s Japanese bayberries collected from a park near Hakone 箱根.

First, harvesting. It’s possible to start collecting pinky fruits when many of them are still green. They can be eaten already at this stage, but the berries are sourer. Naturally, more ripened dark-red version is sweeter. So, unless you aim for tangier jam or liquor, it would be better to wait for few more days. When the fruits are fully matured, they fall off from the tree naturally; for a large tree, the scenery feels like a rain of bayberries. If the ground is soft enough we can collect beautiful berries from the ground. Actually, at this stage I found it tricky to pick fruits from trees as it is easy to squash the flesh of berries with fingers ... Japanese bayberries can be eaten fresh but they have distinctively clinical smells so that they might be in the category of “acquired” taste. The ripening fruits also attract drosophila for blowing. So, it is highly advisable to soak the berries in salted water for at least 3-4 hours before eating or cooking. Drosophila eggs and larvae are not poisonous by themselves, but it’s a matter of … er, human mentality regarding food. Some say 1-2 hours is enough for deworming, but I took safer approach and left the batch overnight. Next morning, I found tiny carcasses of larvae sunk at the bottom of the salty water … macabre peace of my mind … 😅

Ripening Japanese bayberries.
At this stage even the red ones are still tangy.

Please compare it with the above photo.
This is for the fruits ripened.
They are falling like raindrops.

The harvested fruits are washed under the running water.

When washing, better taking off the stems
especially when you plan to make a preserve.

Soaking Japanese bayberries in 3-5% salted water.
With this level of concentration,
the eggs of drosophila definitely die.
Their tiny white larvae come out from the fruit
to escape the torture and be killed anyway by dehydration.

Dewormed Japanese bayberries.
After overnight soaking, I washed them carefully
to remove any carcasses of larvae and dirt.

Washed and dewormed Japanese bayberries run fast so that we have to process the fruit within 2 days of harvesting. The easiest is to make Bayberry liquor, sour and syrup. They’ll be done within 5 minutes each for preparation. Bayberry syrup is made of rock sugar and berries stored alternately in a distilled jar. It’ll be ready in 2 weeks or so. This year I made bayberry liquor and sour. For bayberry liquor, I put prepared bayberries and rock sugar alternately in a clean glass jar, then poured white liqueur. The most gorgeous alcohol to be used in this way in Japan is Okinawan distilled spirits, called Awamori 泡盛 … but they are not cheap in Yokohama. So, I use regular distilled alcohol of at least 35% alcohol percentage. For bayberry sour, distilled alcohol is replaced by white vinegar. After placing the prepared jars in cool and dark place, we wait … Bayberry sour will be ready within 3-4 days, but the taste matures if we can leave it for at least a month. For bayberry liquor, we should wait for at least a month, and leaving it more can make the taste mellower.

Bayberry liqueur after 2 weeks of preparation.
The smaller jar has 1 portion (g) bayberry,
1 portion (g) of rock sugar and 1.5 portions (ml) of distilled alcohol.
The bigger jar is 2 portion of bayberry,
1 portion of rock sugar, and 3.6 portion of distilled alcohol.
I plan to open them in late September.

Bayberry sour after 2 weeks of preparation.
It has 1 portion of bayberry,
1 portion of rock sugar,
and 1 portion of rice vinegar.
Some say apple cider vinegar adds flavor,
but I decided to use rice vinegar
in order for the taste of bayberry to stand out.
They’ll be opened at the same time for bayberry liqueur.

I also made bayberry jam. This process is more time consuming.

1. Put the prepared bayberries in non-reactive pan and pour in just enough water to cover the fruits.
2. Bring to boil the pan with medium heat and cook until the fruit is soft enough to be crushed.
3. Strain the cooked bayberries to remove the stones. If you puree the bayberries finer, the end product is more “preserve” without much trace of fruit flesh. If you prefer rustic jam, just removing the stones would be enough.
4. Measure the weight of strained bayberries. Return the pureed bayberries into the non-reactive pan and add sugar of 30-50% weight of berries. Bring to boil, and keep stirring to dissolve the sugar and to reduce the puree to the consistency of your choice. During this stage, maintain the heat at the highest point just preventing the contents to be burned. Don’t employ low heat and cooking for a prolonged time. The quicker your job, the brighter the color of the jam at the end will be. Also, the puree becomes sticky rapidly so that the more you cook, the more the consistency of the preserve is. It’s up to you when to stop cooking. Some recommend adding lemon juice with sugar, but I found my bayberries are acidic enough to coagulate rapidly without any help.

Cooking bayberries

Removing the stones from cooked bayberries.
The size of a bayberry stone is similar to an American cherry.

Reducing the mixture of
2 parts bayberry puree and 1 part sugar.
We have to stir constantly.

My bayberry jam

Another bayberry jam of mine.
For this one, I strained the cooked bayberries more.
It has become more jelly like.

The taste of my bayberry jam is tangier than store-bought strawberry jam. I added sugar in 50% weight of bayberry puree so that mine would be sweeter than that of 30%. Even though I notice strawberry jam marketed by Imperial Hotel is far sweeter … No wonder people say home-made jam is healthier. Now I am waiting for my bayberry liqueur and sour to mature. They’ll be on time to accompany with the autumnal harvest. 😋