Recently, we spent a few days in Nikkō, in the mountains northwest of Tokyo. The town itself is known for the shrine of Tōshō-gū, where Tokugawa Ieyasu (1543–1616), the deified founder of the Edo shogunate, is enshrined. But the landscape was sacred long before its association with Tokugawa, shaped by centuries of mountain worship across its cedar forests, waterfalls, volcanic lakes, marshland, and the mass of Mt. Nantai itself. In the Meiji era, Nikkō became a destination for Westerners seeking its natural beauty. The British diplomat Ernest Satow published the first English guide in 1875 and built a summer villa at Lake Chūzenji above Nikkō. In Unbeaten Tracks in Japan (1880), Isabella Bird made a virtue of Nikkō’s long-standing pilgrimage character, presenting the difficulty of accessing the site and its remoteness as part of its appeal for Westerners. By the early twentieth century, the British, Italian, French, and Belgian embassies all maintained summer villas around the lake.
Since 1934, the area has been a national park, as impressive as any in the US. We stayed in Okunikko, “inner Nikkō,” on the shore of Lake Chūzenji under Mount Nantai, the sacred volcano whose eruption formed the lake by creating a volcanic dam and whose presence still anchors the region’s mountain worship. It was March, and the air was still cold, especially where the wind came off the water. Snow lingered in places. We saw wild snow monkeys in town, where signs warned tourists not to feed them; one sign explained the monkeys have learned that people carry food in plastic bags and will rip them out of your hands.
On our second day, we took a bus to Yudaki Falls (“hot water waterfall”) and then climbed up to Yunoko Lake. Yunoko is a small volcanic lake, three kilometers around, formed when an eruption of Mt. Mitsudake, just to the east, dammed the Yugawa River. Hot springs feed it from below. The Yumoto Onsen, on the other side of the lake, has been in use for over a thousand years. The lake smelled strongly of sulfur. I found it hard to stay by the shore for long.
Along the road near the falls, a concrete retaining wall holds the volcanic hillside in place. This wall struck me because, however heavy-handed it is, the concrete lattice deforms to follow the topography of the rock face. My friend Gary Paige, who knows much more about Japan than I do, pointed me to the work of the photographer Toshio Shibata, who has produced some beautiful images of Japan’s erosion-control infrastructure.
Descending from the falls, we continued for about four miles through the forest and then out onto Senjōgahara marsh. Snow was just melting, and the trail through the forest was muddy and slippery until we reached the marsh and its boardwalk.
As we walked through the forest, I noticed that the ground was dense with dwarf bamboo (Sasa nipponica). I knew it was native, but something was off: the understory had the uniformity of a monoculture: the bamboo extended as far as the eye could see, and the forest canopy seemed more open than it should be. Signs (in English, no less) soon revealed a complicated ecological story. Sika deer (Cervus nippon) are native to Japan, but like white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in the eastern United States, their numbers have surged to historic highs. The causes are the same: Japan’s licensed hunter corps fell from over five hundred thousand in the 1970s to under two hundred thousand by 2014, the farming population has dwindled over the same decades, and warming winters have thinned the snowpack, leading to fewer opportunities for starvation to cull the herd.1 More than that, after the extinction of the Honshū wolf in 1905, deer have had no predators in Japan save hunters. For centuries, the wolf had been a god in Japan, worshiped as Oguchi no Magami, the Large-Mouthed True God. Farmers petitioned it to keep boar and deer off their fields until fears of a rabies epidemic and rising encounters due to deforestation led to a bounty campaign by the Meiji state, modeled directly on efforts in the American West, and turned the sacred animal into vermin.2
The consequences of anthropogenic deer overpopulation in Japan are familiar to anyone who knows the northeastern United States; both areas now face a drastic decrease in the diversity of brush and understory plants, as well as a decline in the number of new trees. But the dwarf bamboo complicates the picture. Deer do browse it, but Sasa also benefits indirectly from deer damage to other species.3 Making matters worse, at Nikkō, a 900-hectare exclosure installed in 2001 has produced disappointing results. By the time of a 2022 study, freed of any deer browse, the bamboo inside the fence stood at about 60 cm tall, whereas the bamboo outside was only 15 to 18 cm tall. The study showed that vascular plant richness was roughly half that of the browsed plots outside, while tree regeneration remained scarce or absent.4 Excluding the deer did not restore the forest; it simply allowed one dominant species to consolidate its hold at the expense of others. No published case exists of a dense multi-decade Sasa monoculture successfully reversed to a diverse understory by any intervention; even clear-cutting combined with herbicide in a long-running Japanese experiment produced only partial, species-biased tree regeneration after three decades.
We are familiar with the concept of invasive species—our Cutleaf coneflower (Rudbeckia laciniata) can be as much of a problem in Japan as Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum) can be for us—but the idea of native plants run amok due to anthropogenic disturbance is more unusual. The closest analogies are the way Hayscented fern (Sitobolium punctilobulum) inhabits forest clearings or Bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum) colonizes woodland floors. In Great Britain, a subspecies of bracken, Pteridium aquilinum subsp. aquilinum, is both native to—again as the result of anthropogenic disturbance—considered a threat to biodiversity. Ironically, both ferns stubbornly refuse to establish themselves on my property. Ecologists have not yet settled on a term for this phenomenon; the closest is “native super-dominance”: the condition in which a species indigenous to a community comes to function like an invader because the regulatory structure that once limited its abundance has been dismantled.5
Homo sapiens is the super-dominant native species par excellence. We are part of these ecosystems, having been in the Japanese archipelago for at least 38,000 years and in the Northeastern United States since the retreat of the last glaciation. Humans have historically shaped the environment almost everywhere. Barring some islands, we are a native species—present for tens of thousands of years across Africa, Eurasia, Australia, and the Americas—and we have been driving megafauna to extinction for nearly as long. In Australia, giant wombats and marsupial lions vanished within a few thousand years of human arrival 46,000 years ago; in the Americas, mammoths and mastodons followed the same pattern 13,000 years ago. Paul Martin called this the overkill hypothesis: newly arriving humans encountered animals naïve to predation with weapons, and the easily obtained calories drove our rapid colonization of frontier landscapes. Africa was the sole exception: more of its megafauna survived because the animals there co-evolved with humans and learned to be wary of us early on.
After the extinctions, ecosystems found new equilibria—ones that included human hunters as a regulatory force alongside wolves and other predators. For millennia, the system held, with farmers killing deer that threatened their crops while wolves took more, the redundancy of multiple predators kept prey populations below the threshold at which they could overwhelm the vegetation. Industrialization, population growth, and intensive livestock farming dismantled this arrangement: we exterminated the carnivores wherever possible, then left the land ourselves as the farm population collapsed, hunters aged out without replacement, and farmland became housing. We have become a super-dominant native species, and our withdrawal from predation, combined with our extermination of competing predators, has made deer super-dominant alongside us.
Below the forest, we paused at Izumiyadoike Pond and cleaned off our shoes, which were covered in mud from the forest trail. On the flatter boardwalk of Senjōgahara marsh ahead, it was much easier going. Senjōgahara is one of the largest highland marshes on Honshū. Natural history claims it is the product of volcanism. Roughly seventeen thousand years ago, an eruption of Mt. Nantai laid down a massive pyroclastic flow—the Ryūzu Falls pumice-flow deposit—that dammed the Yukawa valley, creating a lake. A later lava flow, around fourteen thousand years ago, created the separate dam that formed Lake Chūzenji downstream. The upper lake gradually filled with sediment and became marsh. The cold weather on the site slowed the decay of plant matter, leading to a peat-forming wetland, which I am told is called a “high moor.”
But there is another account. Senjōgahara means “Battlefield Plain.” According to the local legend, it takes that name from a war between the deity of Mt. Nantai and the deity of the more distant Mt. Akagi over Lake Chūzenji in which Nantai became a great serpent and Akagi a giant centipede.6 The serpent’s champion, an archer named Sarumaru, shot the centipede through the eye; its blood stained the nearby marsh, which became Akanuma—Red Swamp. In this telling, the conflict is not an event that happened on the land so much as one that made it: the lava flow is the serpent’s movement, the ash cloud the centipede’s thrashing. Near the end of the trail, a creek runs red—iron in the water, or the centipede’s blood.
It’s hard not to read our own ecological battle into this myth. No surprise, this area is also threatened by anthropogenic factors. Deer had punched holes four to ten centimeters across through the Sphagnum mats, baring the peat beneath and collapsing the wildflower communities that depended on them. Seventeen kilometers of deer-exclusion fencing had to be built around the marsh in 2001. Invasive species are also a threat: Ministry of the Environment crews pull cutleaf coneflower (Rudbeckia laciniata) by hand from Senjōgahara every summer.7 But, tempting though it is, I am not sure how useful it is to draw the analogy with the mythological battle.
While walking through Senjōgahara, I thought it might be more useful to think about how Japanese mountain worship traditions treat the land. In the American imagination, land is mostly either wilderness—to be protected from people—or scenery—to be improved for them. Both treat land as object, with humans outside. Even our idea of anthropogenic change, which I have repeatedly deployed in this essay, seems to portray humans as latecomers to long-established ecologies. But at Senjōgahara, the signs told us, the sacred landscape is made by gods who don’t just dwell on mountains, they are mountains. Humans, like the archer Sarumaru, are not latecomers but rather participants in the battles. Wolves are also gods, with Oguchi no Magami being petitioned by farmers to keep deer off fields.
In mountain worship, kami are not spirits that inhabit landscape features—they are the features: a waterfall is a god and a mountain is a god. But humans are not a separate creation either, rather they are late-arriving kin, descended from kami, capable of becoming kami themselves after death. Ancestors become kami; emperors—until the end of the War—are living kami. The framework does not recognize nature, humanity, or culture as separate categories.
But there’s a complication. Shintō is in many ways constructed. Fabio Rambelli argues that the idea of the Japanese love of nature is largely a Meiji-era conflation of nativist scholarship and Western Orientalism; the word shizen (nature) is itself a Meiji neologism, coined to translate the Western concept. In contrast, he claims, in medieval Buddhist doctrines, sacred trees were not ecological but institutional—tools to justify temple control over forests. The same is true of my own country and Lithuanian pagan traditions: Francis Young shows that much of what we think we know about Perkūnas and the Baltic gods was assembled by sixteenth-century antiquarians and nineteenth-century nationalists, who created mirages through transcription errors and reliance on Indo-European comparative linguistics. We continue to assemble the religion today through the religion of Romuva.8
Still, this does not entirely invalidate the framework. All ways of seeing landscape are historical constructions; wilderness itself is a nineteenth-century invention, a legal and cultural fiction that justified the frontier by declaring inhabited land empty. The question is what a framework helps us perceive. The wilderness/scenery binary treats humans as external to nature—either protecting it from afar or consuming it as view. The kami model, however modern its current form, at least poses the question differently: humans as participants in a continuum, capable of damaging but also of belonging. For thinking about the withdrawal of human predation, about our strange position as a native species that has removed itself from the predator function, that reframing may be more useful than treating ourselves as outside forces acting upon nature.
The archaeologist Mark Edmonds makes a similar point about Neolithic monuments in Britain. We assemble the past, he writes, in a world shaped by very different values and desires, and these in turn shape the pasts that we write.9 No landscape sits out there waiting to be exploited. Landscapes are subjective, understood as much by ways of acting as by ways of seeing. The professional archaeologist and the modern pagan are both constructing pasts through their present concerns. This does not make either framework false—it makes both of them historical, which is to say, human.
Perhaps invented traditions are even more appropriate for our time than inherited ones. The frameworks we construct now are built for our present needs rather than received from contexts that no longer apply. In my recent essay on the Zen garden, I argued the dry garden was not really Zen at all—that building one in New Jersey was kitsch. I still think so, but the reason sits differently now. A Zen garden imported as a set piece, raked and viewed from a veranda, encodes exactly the separation Zen doctrine refuses. If one is to deny the self, one needs to deny the separation from the surrounding world. The question is not whether to abandon the Zen garden but how one would invent it now. A Zen garden for our time could not be a composition to contemplate. It would have to be an engagement—planting, weeding, succession, decay—with the human inside the garden rather than on the veranda, sipping a gin and tonic.
As for Senjōgahara, to me, the Battlefield Plain’s lesson was that we have lost our way in the world. We have forgotten that we are not outside of nature, we are within it. The town of Montclair, for its part, just passed an ordinance declaring that deer hunting is illegal on township land. There hasn’t been a deer cull in the area in the entire time I have lived in town, but if a bear is sighted, it is killed straightaway by the police, and residents breathe a sigh of relief on Facebook. One animal has been deemed innocent, another has been deemed dangerous. Until we construct better myths for our relationship to the world than Disney’s Bambi, life here will be out of balance.
1 Hayato Iijima, Junco Nagata, Ayako Izuno, Kentaro Uchiyama, Nobuhiro Akashi, Daisuke Fujiki, and Takeo Kuriyama, “Current sika deer effective population size is near to reaching its historically highest level in the Japanese archipelago by release from hunting rather than climate change and top predator extinction,” The Holocene 33, no. 6 (2023): 718–729, https://doi.org/10.1177/09596836231157063. On the quantitative land-use and snow-cover attribution, Haruka Ohashi, Yuji Kominami, Motoki Higa, Dai Koide, et al., “Land abandonment and changes in snow cover period accelerate range expansions of sika deer,” Ecology and Evolution 6, no. 21 (2016): 7763–7775, https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.2514. ↩
2 Brett L. Walker, The Lost Wolves of Japan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). ↩
3 Masaki Ando, Akemi Itaya, Shin-ichi Yamamoto, and Eiji Shibata, “Expansion of dwarf bamboo, Sasa nipponica, grassland under feeding pressure of sika deer, Cervus nippon, on subalpine coniferous forest in central Japan,” Journal of Forest Research 11, no. 1 (2006): 51–55, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10310-005-0180-9. ↩
4 Lisa Petersson, Carl Salk, Daniel Jensen, Göran Thor, and Tatsuhiro Ohkubo, “Long-Term Deer Exclusion Releases Dwarf Bamboo, Reducing Vascular Plant Diversity,” Applied Vegetation Science 28 (2025): e70018, https://doi.org/10.1111/avsc.70018. The Nikkō result is consistent with the broader Japanese record that even aggressive intervention reverses Sasa only partially. See T. Masaki, N. Tanaka, T. Yagihashi, M. Ogawa, H. Tanaka, H. Sugita, T. Sato, and T. Nagaike, “Dynamics of dwarf bamboo populations and tree regeneration over 40 years in a clear-cut beech forest: effects of advance weeding and herbicide application,” Journal of Forest Research 26, no. 2 (2021): 138–147, https://doi.org/10.1080/13416979.2020.1847376. ↩
5 Vânia Regina Pivello, Marcus Vinicius Vieira, Maria Tereza Grombone-Guaratini, and Dalva Maria Silva Matos, “Thinking about Super-Dominant Populations of Native Species—Examples from Brazil,” Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation 16, no. 2 (2018): 74–82, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pecon.2018.04.001. For a northeastern U.S. analogue, see Songlin Fei, Peter Gould, Melanie Kaeser, and Kim Steiner, “Distribution and Dynamics of the Invasive Native Hay-Scented Fern,” Weed Science 58, no. 3 (2010): 408–412. For the two-decade argument over whether a native species can be “invasive,” see Mark A. Davis et al., “Don’t Judge Species on Their Origins,” Nature 474 (2011): 153–54, https://doi.org/10.1038/474153a; Daniel Simberloff et al., “The Natives Are Restless, But Not Often and Mostly When Disturbed,” Ecology 93, no. 3 (2012): 598–607, https://doi.org/10.1890/11-1232.1; and Heidi A. Nackley et al., “The Nebulous Ecology of Native Invasions,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 32, no. 11 (2017): 814–24, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2017.08.003. ↩
6 “Senjo-ga-hara Marshland in Nikko,” Japan Travel, https://en.japantravel.com/tochigi/senjo-ga-hara-marshland-in-nikko/1761. See also “Mukade Centipede Legends,” Heian Period Japan, https://heianperiodjapan.blogspot.com/2016/07/mukade-centipede-legends.html. ↩
7 Sachiko Itō and Takeo Tanimoto, “Changes in Plant Communities in Okunikko Senjōgahara Wetland” (奥日光戦場ヶ原湿原の植物群落の変化), 51st Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of Japan, Kushiro, 2004, https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/esj/ESJ51/0/ESJ51_0_430/_article/-char/ja/. On the coneflower removal, see Tochigi Prefecture, “Okunikko Wetlands (Ramsar Site),” https://www.pref.tochigi.lg.jp/d04/eco/shizenkankyou/shizen/ramsar.html. ↩
8 Fabio Rambelli, Vegetal Buddhas: Ideological Effects of Japanese Buddhist Doctrines on the Salvation of Inanimate Beings (Kyoto: Italian School of East Asian Studies, 2001), 72–73; Francis Young, The Silence of the Gods: The Question of Baltic Paganism in Reformation-Era Prussia and Lithuania (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2024), 48–50. ↩
9 Mark Edmonds, Ancestral Geographies of the Neolithic: Landscape, Monuments and Memory (London: Routledge, 1999), 9–10. ↩