By Isla Quinn
Nobody can tell you exactly how old Jōmon Sugi is, and that uncertainty is itself part of the point. Estimates for this single cedar, deep in the mountain forest of Yakushima, range from around 2,000 to 7,000 years — a spread wide enough that the tree could have started growing anywhere from the height of the Roman Empire to well before the Egyptian pyramids, and nobody’s prepared to narrow it further with confidence. It was found by hikers on 28 May 1966, and its size and evident age turned it almost immediately into the reason most visitors come to this island at all.
The wider forest earned Yakushima a place among Japan’s first Natural World Heritage Site designations in 1993, and Jōmon Sugi is simply the most famous resident of a landscape full of ancient cedars, known collectively as yakusugi — a term reserved specifically for cedars here believed to be at least 1,000 years old, distinguishing them from the merely old trees found elsewhere in Japan.
Reaching the tree isn’t casual. It sits well up the mountain, along a trail that runs through moss-covered forest thick enough to feel closer to a fable than a hiking route, and most visitors treat the walk itself as the point rather than a means to an endpoint. The island’s climate — extraordinarily wet, even by Japanese standards — is part of what let cedars here grow this old in the first place and part of why the forest floor stays as densely mossed as it does year-round.
Yakushima beyond the forest is a small, mountainous island off Kyushu’s southern coast, with a coastline distinct enough from its interior that the same short ferry ride can take you from beach towns to something that looks, convincingly, like old-growth wilderness.
Sephari doesn’t yet have sourced, checked profiles of woodworkers or other makers working with yakusugi material on the island — wood from protected ancient trees carries obvious sourcing questions we’re not prepared to wave past.
Yakushima makers can find out what’s involved at /sell-with-sephari/