with nearly a quarter of the population partaking in some shinrin
action. Hundreds of thousands of visitors walk the Forest Therapy
trails each year.
I MET UP WITH Miyazaki at the country’s newest proposed therapy site,
Juniko state park on the edge of the Shirakami Mountains in northern
Japan. He was swatting mosquitoes from his face and neatly trimmed
gray hair. He wasn’t looking relaxed at all. It had rained recently, and
he was worried the trail might be too muddy for his upcoming
walking experiment. He was kicking some rocks out of the way and
overseeing the setting-up of a netted, canopied minilab. The next
morning, Miyazaki and Lee would be bringing twelve male college-
student volunteers here, measuring various vital signs after they
walked and sat and generally forest-bathed. Then they would repeat
the experiment the next day in downtown Hirosaki, a city of 100,000,
two hours away by car. I would join as one of Miyazaki’s guinea pigs.
The trail deemed walkable, several of us retired to a quiet
restaurant in Hirosaki. We took off our shoes and sat cross-legged on
the floor while Miyazaki ordered and then distributed a baffling array
of dishes involving goopy eggs, gelatinous balls and surf-and-turf
combinations.
“Why do the Japanese think about nature so much?” I asked
Miyazaki, who was preparing to eat a manta ray.
“Don’t Americans think about nature?” he asked me.
I considered. “Some do and some don’t.” But I was thinking, an
amazing amount of us don’t, given our downward trends in outdoor
time and visits to parks.
“Well,” he mused. “In our culture, nature is part of our minds and
bodies and philosophy. In our tradition, all things are relative to
something else. In Western thought, all things are absolute.”
Maybe it was the sake, but he was losing me.