The Edge of Kasugayama Primeval Forest

At the boundary between the city park and Kasugayama Primeval Forest, mesh fences surround young shii and kashi, while markings for removal are visible on nearby trunks. Here, at the same time, some young trees are protected from deer and others are removed before they become established. Workers from the prefecture and conservation groups regularly patrol this narrow strip, checking new seedlings and maintaining the boundary between park and forest.

Beyond this edge begins a forest that people have protected for twelve centuries. In eight forty-one, Emperor Ninmyō prohibited cutting trees and hunting on Mount Kasuga: it was considered the shrine's sacred territory. The word “primeval” refers to the ancient type of evergreen broadleaf forest preserved here. Storms felled trees, fires left clearings, and people laid roads and made plantings. But timber was not harvested here from generation to generation, as it was on the surrounding mountains.

One of the plantings made by people eventually reached this boundary. In nineteen twenty-five, Sakata Shizuo, head of the prefecture's park division and the person responsible for improving Nara Park, returned from Nagasaki with seeds of the Chinese tallow tree. In Japan, it is called nankin-haze. Sakata needed an ornamental tree that could grow in open areas and provide bright autumn color.

He first raised saplings in the park. Around nineteen twenty-nine, they were planted at a new site in Kasugano, and the planting pleased the public. Five years later, several dozen trees were moved near the road from the park entrance toward the museum. Sakata's official experiment succeeded: nankin-haze became a noticeable part of autumn in Nara.

The experiment continued without gardeners. Birds dispersed the seeds, while deer hardly ate young nankin-haze, eating instead the shoots of local oaks, shii, and kashi growing beside them. After the typhoon of nineteen sixty-one and the forest fire of nineteen seventy-eight, sunlit clearings appeared in the canopy. The light-loving tree quickly occupied them and began advancing from the maintained park into the protected forest.

Now prefectural staff and members of conservation groups remove nankin-haze, monitor its new seedlings, and put mesh fences around young native trees so deer cannot reach them. At the very edge, both parts of this work come together: shii and kashi grow behind the fence, while trees marked for removal grow from seeds that Sakata brought to Nara one hundred years ago.