Watazu Jinja

Watatsu Jinja.

On the island of Sado, in the Sea of Japan, sits a shrine that, more than any other, embodies the strange combined history of forest and gold.

Sado, an island roughly the size of Tokyo's twenty-three central wards but with a population of just fifty thousand, was once the source of an extraordinary fortune. From the seventeenth to the early twentieth century, the gold and silver mines of Sado produced massive wealth — at one point, accounting for as much as a third of the world's silver supply.

Mining requires wood. Massive amounts of it. Tunnels need supports. Smelters need fuel. Workers need shelter. For three centuries, the forests of Sado were cut at unprecedented rates.

This shrine remembers what was lost — and what was protected.

Sacred groves around the shrine were never cut. Even at the height of the mining boom, when wood was being hauled out of every other valley, the forest immediately around this shrine was kept untouched. The deity, in old understanding, was the spirit of trees, of forestry done with restraint, of the difference between cutting and clear-cutting.

Today, the mines are mostly closed. The wealth has dispersed. The forests, slowly, have been growing back.

The shrine is still here. The sacred grove is still here. Walking the paths around the shrine, you walk through some of the oldest continuous forest left on Sado.

Stand under the cedars. The trees that everyone else lost, this place kept.

Some places refuse to be exhausted, even when everything around them gives in.