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1: mount miyanoura, japan -
the auroran sunset
Here at abelard.org, we take a lot of photographs. Many
of them are pretty. This is the first of what I hope will become a regular
“photograph with little or no explanation or comment” feature.
As you can see below, we aren’t very good at stopping ourselves from
explaining. We’ll try harder next time!
Three photos from an autumn walk [12 Nov. 2005] up Yakushima Island’s
[1] Mount Miyanoura. At 1935 metres high, this
makes it the highest mountain in Kyushu [area marked in blue on
the map], and 70th highest in Japan. Yakushima Island is a two-hour
catamaran ride away from Kagoshima port.
Sitting on the edge of the Pacific Ocean, the island is almost perfectly
circular and covered in mountains, waterfalls and Japanese
cedar (sugi) forests. The forests are full of monkeys and deer,
outnumbering the people on the island. The climate is semi-tropical and
the people are friendly and kind even by Japanese standards. A lovely place
for a holiday.
end notes
- Shima, sometimes
jima, is the Japanese word for “island”, so saying
Yakushima Island is somewhat tautologous.
Yukushima is 130 km around, and has an area of about 500 square km. It has
a population of about 14,000. Yukushima has 45 mountains over 1,000 metres
and 20 over 1,500 metres. Japan’s tallest mountain is Mount Fuji at
3776 metres, called Fuji-san by the natives. This is a kind of Japanese
pun: san is a polite suffix to put on someone else’s name, like Mr
or Miss in English. It is also one way to read the kanji character for mountain
 .
It is very easy to pun in Japanese, so this sort of word-play is common.
- Just as with Britain and Hawaii,
“Kyushu” is usually used to refer to only the large island,
but sometimes to refer to the archipelego. Yakushima is part of the Kyushu
archipelego.
hover for names of coloured regions
- Sugi trees (cryptomeria japonica) are not
true cedars. Sugi are huge hardwood trees with amazingly smooth bark. Some
of them are apparently thousands of years old. One tree on the island (called
the Jomon
Sugi) is estimated at 2,700 years old, although locals claim 7,000 plus
years. This latter claim is seriously implausible, given that the oldest
known tree was only 4,862 years old when a researcher chopped it down by
misadventure in 1954. Both that tree and the current oldest known tree
are bristlecone pines, pinus longaeva. The unlucky tree was found
in Wheeler Peak in Nevada. The current title-holder resides in the White
Mountains of California, where the original longevity research on this species
was done.
next
2: Globe-trotting Flowers
other things you might find pretty
the abelard.org art gallery
architectural items
at www.abelard.org
the web address for the article above is
https://www.abelard.org/news/pretty0605.php
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