Travel Through Japan with Kyoko
Relieve Your Stress With a Moss Walk in Aomori
The Oirase Keiryu River Gorge is Covered With Hundreds of Different Kinds of Moss
Before Covid, I was a globetrotter and traveled around the world. Though Covid made that impossible, it gave me the opportunity to travel domestically on behalf of foreign media who couldn’t enter Japan. I was lucky to be able to discover more wonderful places in Japan. Among the most impressive was the moss walk at Oirase Keiryu in Aomori Prefecture.
Aomori in the northernmost prefecture in the main island on Honshu. Oirase Keiryu (Gorge) is part of Towada Hachimantai National Park.
I love moss. I’ve had the chance to make moss balls (苔玉 kokedama) at workshops in Tokyo. If you touch it, you will enjoy its fluffiness and adorable features.
In a moss workshop in Tokyo, a teacher gave us 4 different types of moss to make a hakoniwa miniature garden. That’s when I found out that there were so many different kinds of moss in Japan.
With that experience, I was excited to join the Aomori moss walk for a filming project. We visited Hoshino Resorts Oirase Keiryu Hotel where they offered the moss walk as one of their activities in November last year.
You can watch the video we made for the Morning Express TV Show in Singapore. At the end, you can see the Towada sauna that followed the moss walk.
The moss walk is quite flat and easy. The gorge stretches from Nenokuchi on Lake Towada to Yakeyama. The total distance is about 14 km (8.6 miles) but we didn’t walk the full length. It was short and a good activity for all ages.
I interviewed Hiroyuki Niwa, the nature guide at Hoshino resorts and kept this interview memo. It is full of interesting information I’d like to share with you.
Moss plays a very important role in the Oirase River basin. It created the beginning of the forest. Mosses don’t have roots but can stick anywhere. If there is soil and sun, they can survive. When Towada Lake collapsed and washed away everything, leaving only rocks, the moss started to grow on them and became like a cradle. It absorbed and held water, dust and sand and became fluffy. Other plants started to grow out of that bed of moss. It took more than 15,000 years to grow plants like this, but gradually matured into this forest you see now at Oirase Keiryu.
There are more than 300 varieties of moss here now. You can find 30 different varieties of moss at this large rock. Moss is very small so you can see beautiful green but if you look through a magnifying glass, you’ll see a different world.
After the rain, the moss looks very beautiful and you can see it’s glowing. We walk past without noticing the beauty of it. The big nature consists of lots of gatherings of small nature. Once you realize there is more moss than you learned at school, if you become more interested in moss, it’s even better to see it through the magnifying glass to see the different colors and shapes.
“Can you see this? It is called houshitai (胞子体 )— a sporophyte. Can you see the strings? That’s sporophyte.”
Once the sporophyte matures, it will spread. It doesn’t bloom like a flower but in the Spring, it spreads sporophyte, like the compound of love. It is glowing and it almost looks like it is creating a forest as well.
Oirase Keiryu is a valley with a lot of moisture. The river’s flow, splash, and water vapor gather in the valley and create moisture all year round. Even the handrails are covered in moss.
Moss doesn’t have roots and sometimes absorbs water from the air and rain. It doesn’t like dryness. It likes the mist of the river flow. Moss grows on the rocks and becomes like this mattress. Then when plant seeds drops here, it is like a cradle for plants. Everybody touches the softness of the moss and feels the softness of nature.
There are rocks in the river but trees growing from the moss creating a forest in the river. The river won’t flood from Towada Lake. It is moist all year round. There is a meter of snow in winter protecting the moss from dryness. So there is a lot of moss on the rocks, and the moss creates the forest, and the moss connects all of nature.
There are 1700 to 1800 varieties of moss in Japan. In the world, the number is 10 times more.
This is oshipo goke (大尻尾蘚) — it feels interesting to the touch.
This is yugami cho-chingoke.
This one with glowing red roots is called kofusagoke. After the rain, with a magnifying glass, it looks look like sea grapes — many women visitors love it. The sporophyte is like a flower. These sporophytes grows from female pistils. There are male stamen. The pistil will spread the spore and pollination will occur to spread the moss. Depending on the season, you can see different sporophytes and different colors, so there is never a dull moment.
Jagoke is a bit grotesque. It almost looks like snake scales.
One fun part of the moss walk is to learn the different shapes of moss. Another fun part is understanding how the forest was created. By looking at the moss with a magnifying glass, you get a different perspective of the forest. Usually when you are walking, you don’t pay attention to moss. But now you’ll look at the moss and it will change how you look at the forest. You’ll look at living animals and creatures in the forest more.
After the interview with Hiroyuki Niwa, it was an eye-opening moment. Forest walking itself is quite meditating and has been a trend since the 1980s to enjoy shinrin-yoku (森林浴) forest bathing among stressed out Japanese businesspeople. Now with the Covid disaster creating an especially stressful environment, it was so refreshing to walk along the Oirase Keiryu River and stop by here and there to learn about moss along the way.
There is a kind of moss that smells like matsutake mushrooms and moss that smell like herbs. Just breathing the forest air and smelling the moss was a healing moment for me. For my physical and mental well-being, it improved my feeling of happiness and improved all the stress I had.
What a great experience this was. I hope more people will visit Oirase Keiryu and learn about this moss through a knowledgeable nature guide.
I hope more people will join this healing tourism in Aomori and feel refreshed after spending time there like I did.
— — Additional information other than moss walk— -
After the moss walk, it is nice to participate in a moss ball-making workshop at the hotel or just enjoy the lovely views from the hotel. I’ve included a few photos below so you can see how gorgeous this hotel is.
Sometime I’d like to visit the hotel in a different season. I’m sure it is beautiful to visit now with the lights shining on the hyobaku waterfall of ice.
