Beech Trees, Rural Revitalization, and Green Tourism: The Origins of the Shinetsu Trail

The origins of the Shinetsu Trail are in the relationship between locals and beech trees of the region. Beech trees, or buna, have the ability to retain water from snowmelt in their root systems, which is steadily released down mountains and provides irrigation for agricultural fields at the base. 

Kazuhiko Takeuchi. Satoyama: The Traditional Rural Landscape of Japan. Cover image used with permission from Springer Nature.

Other traditional uses of beech trees are for the supporting beams of homes and for sustainable forestry. This relationship between the beech forests and local lifestyles in the area can be described as satoyama, or “village-mountain”—a sustainable pattern of land use that emerged in rural Japan, usually in mountainous landscapes close to rural villages. When beech forests were threatened by logging in the 1980s, locals rallied together in a beech tree protection movement. 

Satoyama represents a relationship to the environment rooted in daily lifestyles. As rural regions were re-imagined into places of recreation, satoyama became branded as part of a quintessential experience in rural tourism initiatives.

Kerry Douglas Smith. A Time of Crisis: Japan, the Great Depression, and Rural Revitalization.

Consumerism and material culture defined society in postwar Japan. With the advent of high-speed trains, rural regions became all the more accessible to eager tourists. However, in the postwar period, many people left rural regions like the Sekida Mountains for rapidly industrializing cities like Tokyo and Osaka. In response, the national government launched a rural revitalization campaign to revive rural areas and provided funding for local green tourism initiatives in the 1990s. 

Kōyama Kunitake, mayor of Iiyama city in Nagano, submitted a proposal to create a long-distance hiking trail along the prefectural border between Nagano and Niigata. In the process, a facility called Mori-no-Ie was founded to help establish trails in the region’s beech tree forests and eventually became the foundation for the green tourism initiative that supported the creation of the Shinetsu Trail.

When Japan’s bubble economy burst in the early nineties, the national government steered away from expensive resort-based tourism and turned to supporting sustainably focused tourism projects in rural regions. Such green tourism efforts became the basis of the proposal for the Shinetsu Trail, which the mayor of Iiyama city envisioned as a long trail along the prefectural border between Nagano and Niigata through the Sekida Mountains that would engage in regional history and culture.