Sanbe Azukihara Buried Forest

Sanbe Azukihara Buried Forest looks different depending on the season, the weather, and the time of day — none of which a single photo can tell you.

About four thousand years ago Mt. Sanbe erupted and buried the forest at its foot in volcanic debris — not flattening the trees but burying them upright, roots still in the ground. They are still standing, and you can go down and look at them. An underground exhibition hall was built directly over the excavation, so the visit consists of descending beside cedar trunks that were alive in the Jomon period and are now exposed to their full buried height.

Around thirty standing trees with intact root systems have been confirmed, along with more than a hundred fallen logs. The largest trunk is two and a half metres across and stands over ten metres tall. Buried forests exist elsewhere, but almost never on this scale and almost never still upright — which makes this one of the more genuinely astonishing sites in western Japan and one that gets a tiny fraction of the visitors of the silver mine an hour away.