Robin Agemi helps map a Kyoto forest, including trees used by its traditional crafts.
I first entered this forest in the early autumn, when the summer heat still hung heavy in Kyoto. This forest was a part of the Field Science Education and Research Center of Kyoto University. It was a sprawling site, with gardens, greenhouses and water features near the entrance, from which a number of dirt paths wound their way up the mountains towards the back. All this was comfortably inside the city limits, not far from the university. In another large city, it might be surprising to suddenly encounter a mature forest with a great variety of evergreen and deciduous trees soaring high into the sky right inside the main gate of the facility, but in Kyoto it’s not unusual to find pockets of wilderness that seem to erupt suddenly from the cityscape, blurring the line between the human and natural world.
I was invited to this forest as a member of Perspective, an organization that aims to relocate craft and the materials required to produce it back into the cycle of nature. Based in Keihoku, a mountainous region in the north of Kyoto city that historically supplied much of the lumber that built the city time and time again, we tend to a small area of a forest cultivating a selection of the trees that supply the raw materials needed to produce certain crafts such as kiri (paulownia) wood to make wooden boxes, or urushi (Japanese lacquer), the sap of which is refined into lacquer that can then be applied to other objects.
My work tends to revolve around communication: designing everything from graphics to websites as well as translation and editing, in the hope of drawing people into the wider world of creation from the forest to the objects they use. As part of this work, a few years ago I produced a map of the forest in Keihoku we manage. With the help of a local expert, we spent two days combing through the short stretch of forest, filling in the gaps in our knowledge about the other plants that shared the ecosystem with our species of interest. Though I’m no stranger to the forest, once everything was listed, it was surprising to see how much I hadn’t even noticed.
It got me thinking about the phenomenon of plant blindness, where the inability to recognize plants leads to filtering them out or overlooking them, which leads to an undervaluing of plants and the various essential roles they perform in our environment. This is particularly startling considering how dependent we are on plants for food and climate change mitigation among other things.
About ten years ago when I began to be interested in learning more about wild plants I made another map of edible plants found in public places around Dublin city in Ireland. I identified more than thirty sites supplying a variety of herbs, berries and mushrooms, and found that there were even more that I had missed afterwards! I imagine how differently people long ago (or not even that long ago in some cases), would have seen and thought about the plants that make up their environment. Surveying and mapping the forest in Keihoku, it was enriching to feel that I might have come even a little bit closer to seeing the forest as they did, in vivid detail, where each plant has meaning and many uses.
We used that map as part of an educational programme with primary school children, teaching them about the processes of craft production, from the materials to the final products, as well as forest care and the wider environment.
This time we were invited to do something similar for a new Satoyama/Satoumi co-creation project at the Field Science Education and Research Center. Satoyama refers to the area from the mountains to the human settlement, where historically the world of humans and nature overlapped and complemented each other. Famously, the satoyama has become so ingrained into the natural environment that many species of frogs and insects depend on the agricultural cycles of the rice fields. The satoumi is a similar concept applied to a maritime context. This project extends all over Japan, but in this particular site, the focus is on the satoyama, recreating it and sharing the skills and knowledge associated with this old way of life.
The goal of this satoyama map was to be a guide for the people who participated in the project, which is one of outreach. Both students and regular citizens are welcome to participate to help navigate the forest and learn about the plants that live there and their uses in human culture. They want to create opportunities for all sorts of people to interact with the forest, stewarding it and making use of the bounty it produces.
In order to create the map, we surveyed the forest, narrowing our focus to one particular route. Over a number of days, we worked in collaboration with foresters who maintain the forest, researchers and students to make a detailed list of trees growing along the path. Of these, we focused on trees and plants which had a known use. This still produced far too long a list to squeeze into one little map, so plants were organized into rough categories: consumption, dyeing, daily life, aesthetic appreciation and spirituality.
After much debate, thirty plants were selected for relevance to the project and participating members’ interests (among the members was a practitioner of traditional dyeing techniques and someone who made washi paper which can be made from a type of mulberry called kōzo). Even with this narrowing of scope, it was tricky to untangle the myriad and overlapping uses of some plants: yabutsubaki (camellia) ended up falling under four categories, providing oil that can be used in cooking, polishing, beauty, providing dyestuff as well as having been prized historically for its beautiful flowers that bloom from late winter to spring.
Other things to be included in the map were a charcoal-making area with a striking old-fashioned kiln opposite the satochi, the part of the satoyama where herbs and vegetables were cultivated and the satoyama where the new trees would be planted.
Like the previous maps, it was striking how quickly this map had an impact on how I see the world around me. There were more types of edible berries than I had known, such as shashambo and natsuhaze. Even on a walk near my house now, hedgerows of sakaki and shikimi, both evergreen flowering plants that are often used in religious practices, catch my eye.
Initially, when designing the map I expected to illustrate only a small sample of the plants but in the end, I drew them all. It sounds obvious to say but recreating the plants as an image is a much more effective way of studying them and committing them to memory than simply observing them in situ or reading about them in a book. I would urge anyone interested in knowing more about the plants in their environment to take up a pencil and some means of identifying what you find and head outside. In no time you too can fill in the blanks making the world around you more rich and vibrant in the process.
Further Reading
- Forest of Craft (Perspective’s forest project in Keihoku)
- The New Satoyama/Satoumi Project (Japanese only)
- Overcoming plant blindness in science, education, and society
- The Japanese Land Management Concept of Satoyama (里山) and the Co-Existence of Nature and People
About Robin Agemi
Robin Agemi is a designer, illustrator and translator based on the west side of Biwa Lake in Shiga, Japan. Her work is mainly focused on issues to do with forestry and craft and contextualizing human culture within the wider landscape.
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