Shinrin-yoku

I first came across this word a few years ago. When it was explained to me that it literally translates as “forest bathing,” I immediately thought how fascinating it is that reality shapes a community’s language, and how that same language can shape or reinforce the community’s reality.

I had already heard anecdotes about the specific names for different types of snow that are used in Greenland. I also know Polish words that capture parts of my own reality so precisely that any attempt to translate them ends up requiring a few extra words of explanation. But in the Japanese term shinrin-yoku, I found something especially interesting: a name for a state of calming, healing immersion in nature. It was something I understood very well from my own experience, and yet it had never occurred to me that such a broad and subtle feeling could be held in a single, concise word.

This is what came back to me in the forests surrounding Aizuwakamatsu, near the town of Ashinomaki Onsen. These photographs were taken in a place where I had the chance to get at least a small glimpse of the reality in which this term first took shape.

I ended up there somewhat by chance. During my trip through Southeast Asia, our plans changed after the earthquake in Bangkok, and we stayed in Japan longer than expected. At first, the idea was simply to experience a genuine mountain onsen, somewhere quiet, with natural hot springs and a slower rhythm than the cities we had been moving through.

As it turned out, the hot spring was only part of it. We in the first place found the nerve-soothing forest, which filled us with appreciation for nature’s beauty, calm and turned us into very reflective mood. It was not a dramatic place in the obvious sense. Its calm worked more slowly. The longer I walked there, the more I understood why a language would need a word like shinrin-yoku.

So here are a few photographs from that unexpected forest bath. Trees, rivers, landscapes, birds, and the particular quiet of a place that did not demand to be photographed, but somehow allowed it.