Yakushima
— — a forest that grows its own weather.
Not only on a wall.
“An almost-circular granite island off the southern tip of Kyushu, more mountain than coast. Rain falls most days of the year, and the cedars that grow out of the wet rock have been growing for a very long time — some of them since before any written record of Japan. The trails climb into cloud forest where the moss carries the light. The kind of green that takes a moment to believe. from the studio
Yakushima, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Yakushima is a roughly circular island of about 504 square kilometres lying 60 kilometres south of the southern tip of Kyushu, in Kagoshima Prefecture. Its interior rises sharply to Miyanouradake at 1,936 metres, the highest peak in southern Japan. The island sits where warm subtropical sea air meets a high granite massif, producing what local meteorologists call thirty-five days of rain a month. UNESCO inscribed the interior cedar forest as a World Heritage site in 1993, citing its near-vertical climate gradient from subtropical coast to subalpine summit.
The island's interior is one of the wettest places in Japan, receiving roughly 4,000 to 10,000 millimetres of rain a year depending on elevation. The constant moisture sustains an unbroken understory of moss — more than six hundred recorded species — and the cloud forest along the Shiratani Unsuikyō ravine was a visual reference for Studio Ghibli's 1997 film Princess Mononoke. The trail is open year-round but the wood-plank causeways turn slick after rain.
Most visitors reach Yakushima by a four-hour ferry from Kagoshima or by a thirty-five-minute flight to the island's small airport on the northeast coast. The Jōmon Sugi cedar, the oldest of the giant trees, is reached by a 22-kilometre round-trip walk from the Arakawa trailhead and takes most hikers ten to twelve hours. Shuttle access to the trailhead is regulated from March through November, and an environmental conservation deposit applies to all interior trails.