I suspect that they were more resonant in the original Japanese but still, you get the idea. Who would have thought that some authors would have turned to the subject of hay fever for inspiration? But Shuko Hanayama (not herself a hayfever sufferer) has written several poems on the subject.
TORCHLIGHT 3 LUCK TREE BUG FULL
Japanese cedar ‘cones’, full of allergy-inducing pollen (Photo Seven)Īnd so, to some poetry. It will be interesting to see how Japan rises to the challenge. I have personally never suffered from hay fever, but have known lots of people who have, and I know how miserable it can be. The government is trying to move towards growing varieties of Sugi which produce less pollen but as more timber is imported than grown in Japan, so the number of people skilled in forestry in the country has dropped dramatically. The hayfever drug market in Japan is booming, and some people even take ‘hayfever holidays’ to the low-pollen areas of Hokkaido and Okinawa. The problem is not to be underestimated, however: it affects some people so badly that they resort to laser treatment to ‘turn off’ some of the nerve endings in their noses. I love that, in Japanese, one word for hayfever is kafunsho, which sounds to me exactly like a sneeze. This, coupled with the pollution in cities (which seems to somehow prime people’s immune systems for hay fever) has led to unprecedented levels of the condition. At thirty years, they began to produce pollen. However, it became cheaper to import foreign timber and so the native forests were left unmolested and uncut. There was massive deforestation to provide timber during the Second World War, which led to landslides, soil erosion and other deleterious effects, so in the 1960’s there was a major replanting.
Together with the hinoki, the tree is a major cause of hay-fever in Japan, which is thought to affect up 25% of the population, with those in cities such as Tokyo suffering even higher rates. The relationship between human beings and Japanese cedar is not one of unalloyed tranquillity however. The woodworkers of Akita prefecture in Japan have long been the practitioners of the craft, and manage the forests to ensure that there is a suitable supply of the timber. Only trees over one hundred years old are suitable, and there can be no knots or discolouration in the timber. It is the only wood used in the Japanese craft of magewappa, which uses steam to bend the wood into the beautiful containers shown below. Japanese cedar has been extensively used for its fragrant, light-weight timber. Generally juveniles are easier to manage than adults (though any parent of teenagers may beg to differ). I wonder if this sometimes also extends to plants? Certainly in the case of Japanese cedar we appear to have chosen to freeze the development of the shrub at an early stage, and you could argue that some examples of miniaturisation in plants are doing the same thing. You only have to look at the ‘cute’ features on toys and Disney cartoons to realise that we often prefer the big eyes, huge heads and long limbs of baby creatures to the less endearing hairiness and muscles of the adult. I find it interesting that humans often select for juvenile characteristics in the animals that we surround ourselves with: the domesticated dog, for example, is said to demonstrate neoteny, because it retains many puppy-like characteristics into adulthood. Japanese cedar var Elegans with its juvenile foliage Somewhere in the middle, the variety Elegans pictured above could result in a tree about 30 feet tall. At one extreme, the tree can grow to 230 feet tall, with a trunk measuring 13 feet in diameter but at the other end of the height scale, Japanese cedar is often used as a bonsai. Japanese cedar is a member of the Cypress family, and is related to the Giant Sequoia ( Sequoiadendron giganteum) though you wouldn’t know it from the smaller cultivar shown above. As the name suggests, the plant is endemic to Japan, where it is known as ‘sugi’. I know that it’s relatively rare in this country, and so some of you will not have seen it before, but I think that, as a specimen plant, it deserves a bit more attention. There was something about the colouration, the feathery foliage and the sheer presence of the shrub that intrigued me.
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Japanese Cedar (Cryptomeria japonica var Elegans)ĭear Readers, I spotted this plant in East Finchley Cemetery a couple of weeks ago, and, in the words of the inestimable Kylie Minogue, I just can’t get it out of my head.
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