Sugisawa no Sawasugi

What sets Sugisawa no Sawasugi apart from other natural sites in Toyama is how much depends on conditions outside anyone's control.

This is a cedar forest growing on flat ground at sea level, fed by springs rising through the Kurobe alluvial fan — which is not where cedars belong, and it behaves accordingly. Snow loads press the lower branches to the ground, the branches root where they touch, and new trunks grow up from the buried limb, so that a single original tree becomes a cluster of stems around a common stock. The process has a name, fukujo koshin, layering renewal, and this is the only lowland forest in Japan where it happens.

Around 45 hectares of it survived into the 1960s. Farmland development took nearly all of it and 2.67 hectares remain, designated a national natural monument in 1973. A boardwalk runs through it past clear springs — the Kurobe fan spring group is on the national list of a hundred famous waters — and a small free interpretation centre at the entrance explains what you are looking at. The whole thing costs nothing and takes forty minutes.