Posts Tagged ‘nature’

Japanese city saws off the tops of trees because leaves are a “garbage problem”

An article at Japan Focus describes how the city of Kawagoe effectively destroyed the beautiful scenery of its “Zelkova Avenue”:

Riding my bicycle on Zelkova Avenue one morning in late September, I noticed several trucks parked along one side of the street as I approached Tsurugashima station. Two trucks with hydraulic lifts raised workers high up into the trees where they were sawing off branches. First, it was on just one short stretch near the station. In the following days, however, the crew moved up the street. They were not just pruning. They were cutting vertical trunks of the trees, six inches or so in diameter. Entire tops of the trees were being sawed off.

[....]

The man who appeared to be in charge replied that the leaves were a problem for people who lived along the street. The leaves would fall on rooftops, get stuck in roof tiles and in storm shutters, and then start to rot. According to him and several others, the leaves posed a “garbage problem” (ごみ問題, gomi mondai). Each day, the crew moved farther along the road, leaving a desolate landscape of bare trunks. In a matter of weeks, the summer landscape was transformed into that of winter. These trees were decapitated, pruned back so radically, that all that remained were rows of leafless trunks.

Read the full story here.

I wish I could say this was a rare thing, but at least two Japanese towns I have lived in did the same thing to their tree-lined avenues. (And, if I recall correctly, the practice is also mentioned in Alex Kerr’s Dogs and Demons.)

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• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)

Albino crow in Japan

Some footage of a rare albino crow that was spotted last month in Yamaguchi Prefecture:

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• Akihabara News – Gadgetry from Japan (Subscribe)
• dannychoo.com – Your portal to Japan (Subscribe)
• Kirainet.com – A geek in Japan (Subscribe)

Non-native plants clog Japanese river

Part of the Kyu-yoshino river in Kagoshima Prefecture has turned green:

The surface of the river is covered in water lettuce plants. Water lettuce is not native to Japan, and it is illegal to cultivate it here, but somehow a few plants managed to find their way into the river and multiply. It is feared that the plants are suffocating the river and killing local plants and fish, so authorities are making their best efforts to remove all the water lettuce. They expect the clean-up to cost hundreds of millions of yen.

Melting Arctic ice spells trouble for Hokkaido tourism

National Geographic warns of a threat to Hokkaido’s natural beauty:

Free-floating pieces of ice that form each winter in the Sea of Okhotsk travel about 620 miles (1,000 kilometers) to Hokkaido’s Shiretoko Peninsula. The ice, which normally lingers near the coast for up to four months, is key to the region’s rich biodiversity, including many rare seabirds and marine mammals.

In recent years, however, the peninsula has seen noticeably less drift ice, raising fears that global warming is to blame.

Arctic sea ice overall has been disappearing much faster than initially predicted, with some experts saying that the region’s summer ice could be gone within five years.

According to the article, the ice carries nutrients that are vital to the survival of plankton, which form the base of the food chain around Hokkaido. Reduced ice drift could seriously damage the ecosystem of Shiretoko National Park.

North American Bird Makes Rare Appearance In Japan

A FTV report about the sighting of a bird that is rarely seen in Japan:

The bird in the video is a White-crowned Sparrow, which are native to Northern Canada and the Western United States. There have only been 7 recorded sightings of White-crowned Sparrows in Japan, and this is the first time one has been seen on the island of Shikoku. The bird’s summer plumage is now visible, so observers expect that it will soon fly north and return to its home.

According to Wikipedia, this isn’t the first case of a White-crowned Sparrow migrating far from its natural breeding habitat. Vagrant White-crowned Sparrows have sometimes made their way to England and Ireland.

Graveyard Cherry Blossoms

Tokyo’s cherry blossoms are in full bloom, so lets face it: every large park with cherry trees is going to be so packed full of people that it will be near impossible to walk around and enjoy the flowers. There are some locations that may not be so crowded, as this FTV news clip shows:

The report shows a group of foreign students who are having a cherry blossom viewing party in Aoyama Cemetery. Apparently many Japanese people would be creeped-out by the idea of picnicking among the gravestones, but these foreigners don’t seem to have much of a problem with it.

The report may be misleading though, since I did find a British Airways travel guide page that recommends Aoyama Cemetery as a cherry blossom viewing location. I also checked a few big Japanese sakura websites, and one of them does include the cemetery on its list. [So if you go to Aoyama Cemetery this weekend and find it ultra-crowded, don't say we didn't warn you!]