Yakushima’s forest is a rain-soaked, moss-covered cedar forest on a round granite island of 504.88 km² in Japan’s Ōsumi Islands, Kagoshima Prefecture, about 61 km south of the tip of Kyushu’s Ōsumi Peninsula. Its fame rests on the yakusugi, Japanese cedars (Cryptomeria japonica) more than 1,000 years old that grow mostly above 500 m; the largest, Jōmon Sugi, is 25.3 m tall with a 16.4 m trunk girth and an age estimated at anywhere from about 2,000 to 7,200 years. The island rises to Miyanouradake at 1,936 m (6,352 ft), the highest peak in the Kyushu region, and catches 4,000 to 10,000 mm of rain a year, making it Japan’s wettest place. Its warm-temperate ancient forest became one of Japan’s first natural World Heritage Sites in 1993, and 42 percent of the island lies inside Yakushima National Park. The way to understand it is to walk it: from the subtropical shore, up the river valleys and the old logging railway, into the cedars and on to the bare granite summits.
Nagata-hama, Miyanoura and Anbō: the Warm Coast Where the Journey Starts
Every route into the forest begins at the sea. The island is roughly circular, 28 km across with a coastline of about 89 km, and its two ports, Miyanoura in the north and Anbō in the east, lie 19 km apart, with Yakushima Airport on the coast between them. Ferries and hydrofoils run from Kagoshima, about 135 km to the north, and the flight from Kagoshima Airport takes around 40 minutes. The airport opened in 1963 with an 1,100 m runway, and in April 2024 the transport ministry adopted a project to lengthen it to 2,000 m so that jets can land. Across the Tanegashima Strait, rocket launches from the Japanese space centre on Tanegashima are clearly visible.
The shore is subtropical. The ocean never falls below 19 °C, there are patches of coral reef, and the island holds one of the largest remaining tracts of the Nansei Islands subtropical evergreen forest, an endangered habitat. On the northwest coast, 10 hectares of wetland at Nagata-hama became a Ramsar site in 1993, and the island is the largest nesting ground in the North Pacific for the loggerhead turtle, with three nesting beaches used by about 40 percent of nearby loggerheads. Turtles from Japan’s breeding beaches use a migratory corridor across the Pacific toward California, while juveniles gather to feed off Baja California.
The coastal villages, Miyanoura, Anbō, Onoaida, Hirauchi, Kurio and Nagata, hold almost all of the island’s people: 12,053 in 2020, about half the peak of 24,010 reached in 1960. The old economy of cedar shingles and fishing has given way to oranges, tea, shōchū distilling and tourism. The rain that defines the forest also runs the coast: in 2021 more than 99 percent of Yakushima’s electricity came from hydropower, and the surplus has been used to make hydrogen in a Kagoshima University experiment.
Up the Anbō River on the Island’s Old Forest Railway
From Anbō the forest is reached by following the river inland. A 13 km mountain road climbs to the Arakawa waterfalls and to Yakusugi Land, and beside the river runs the Anbō Forest Railway, also called the Yakushima Forest Railway. Built to haul timber, it is one of the last forest railways still working in Japan: 11.2 km of 762 mm narrow-gauge track plus a 7.1 km branch, running from north of Anbō past the Arakawa falls and the abandoned logging village of Kosugidani to a forest area below Miyanouradake, close to Jōmon Sugi. It still carries freight only, parts of the line serve as hiking trails, and since 2013 there have been efforts to run a section for tourists.
The railway is a reminder that most of this forest has been cut at least once. The earliest record of yakusugi logging is a stone at Kagoshima Shrine stating that Yakushima cedar and cypress were shipped there to rebuild it around 1560. Around 1590, after Toyotomi Hideyoshi subdued Kyushu, his commissioner Ishida Mitsunari had the Shimazu clan survey the island’s timber, and cedar was sent by ship to Kyoto for the Great Buddha Hall of Hōkō-ji. Full-scale logging under the Satsuma Domain began around 1640, after the island-born monk Tomari Jochiku petitioned for it to relieve local poverty. Most of the trees became hiragi, flat roof shingles sent to Satsuma as annual tribute and traded for rice.
The Meiji government banned islanders from cutting the trees and nationalised the forest; the islanders sued and lost, and a 1921 Forestry Bureau plan then opened it to large-scale state logging, with gravel roads around the island. Commercial logging continued until the late 1960s, when a conservation regime was set up, and by 2001 all old-growth timber in the National Forest outside protected zones had been cut. Today no living yakusugi may be felled. Souvenirs come from domaiboku, the "buried wood" of old stumps and trunks brought down by typhoons.
Into the Yakusugi Zone: Wilson Stump and Jōmon Sugi
Above about 500 m the trail enters the yakusugi forest. Strictly, yakusugi means a cedar at least 1,000 years old; younger trees are kosugi, "small cedars", and replanted trees are jisugi. Ordinary Japanese cedar lives about 500 years, but on Yakushima’s thin, nutrient-poor granite soil the trees grow slowly, with very tight grain, and the constant wet fills the wood with resin that resists rot. Many have passed 2,000 years. The forest floor is thick with moss: the island has hundreds of rare endemic bryophytes, more than 50 endemic flowering plants including rhododendrons, and a number of endemic trees, and its misty interior inspired the forest of Hayao Miyazaki’s film Princess Mononoke.
On the trail below Jōmon Sugi stands the Wilson stump, the base of a giant cedar probably felled in the logging of around 1590. It is named after the British plant collector Ernest Henry Wilson, who introduced it to Western readers in 1914 during his travels in Japan. Further up, at about 1,300 m on the north face of Miyanouradake, stands Jōmon Sugi, named after Japan’s Jōmon prehistoric period. It is the oldest and largest of the island’s old cedars, with a volume of about 300 m³, the largest conifer in Japan. Tree-ring dating of its branches shows it is at least 2,000 years old; other estimates run from 2,170 to 7,200 years.
The tree’s discovery in 1968 started the push to protect the forest and created the tourism that now makes up more than half of the island’s economy. Reaching it takes a four-to-five-hour hike from the nearest road, via the Arakawa Trail from the Arakawa Dam or the Kusugawa path east of Miyanoura. After the 1993 World Heritage listing, visitors were kept to a viewing deck 15 m from the trunk; even so, vandals stripped a piece of bark in 2005. In April 2009 Jōmon Sugi was twinned with Tāne Mahuta in New Zealand’s Waipoua Forest. Its neighbours in the forest are the Yakushima macaque, a small, stocky subspecies with black hands and feet, numbering about 9,500 to 19,000 in a 1999 survey, and a local variety of sika deer, the only large native animals on the island. More than 150 bird species live here too.
Miyanouradake and Nagatadake: the Okudake Summits That Make the Rain
The forest ends where the granite takes over. The central mountains, the Okudake, form the core of the national park: Miyanouradake at 1,936 m, Nagatadake at 1,886 m and some 30 other peaks over 1,000 m, all on an island only 28 km wide. Because the bedrock is granite there are no active volcanoes, though the island has numerous hot springs. The Hanayama district of these mountains was set aside as the Yakushima Wilderness Area on 17 May 1975.
These summits are why the forest below exists. Air off the surrounding ocean has to rise more than 1,900 m within about 14 km of the shore, and the island records at least 250 mm of rain in every month, with June the wettest at 773 mm. Annual totals range from 4,000 to 10,000 mm, among the highest anywhere. Autumn and winter are drier; spring and summer bring the heaviest downpours, often with landslides, and typhoons strike too: Typhoon Noru killed one person here in 2017. At the other extreme, Yakushima is the southernmost place in Japan with snow in the mountains, often lasting for months, while the sea a few kilometres away stays above 19 °C. A single climb from Nagata-hama to Miyanouradake therefore runs from a turtle beach with coral offshore to summits that can hold snow.
That is the forest UNESCO listed in 1993, after an 18,958-hectare area had already been made a Man and the Biosphere reserve in 1980. Yakushima National Park, first created in 1964 as part of Kirishima-Yaku National Park, became a separate park in 2012. For how the island fits Japan’s wider pattern of rain and seasons, see our guide to the climate of Japan; for the mountains and islands around it, read our Japan geography facts; and to see how Jōmon Sugi measures against bristlecones and yews, look at our list of the oldest trees in the world.