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Paper short abstract

Yakushima Island, in southern Japan, is known for its sacred mountains and millennia-old cedar trees. My ethnographic fieldwork concentrates on the recent revival of the rituals "takemairi" ("worship of the sacred mountains"), as an attempt to restore the equilibrium of the "eco-semiotic system"

Paper long abstract

At first glance, Yakushima gives an impression of peaceful stability - that of a natural mountainous environment preserved from human impact, embodied by its millennia-old cedar trees and officially stamped by UNESCO with the label of “World Natural Heritage".

For centuries, entry into these mountains was permitted only twice a year during the takemairi, ritual practices that are still observed today. The takemairi (literally “worship of the sacred mountains”) is a ritual performed by each of the island’s 24 communities, in which people begin the ascent from the sea to the top of the okudake in order to make offerings to the gods. In the islanders’ worldview, maedake (“the mountain in front”) is the part that humans can enter and use for forestry, whereas okudake (“the remote mountain,” the highest peaks invisible from the village) are the place of the gods, protecting the island and furnishing resources to islanders through the rivers.

But over the centuries, industrial forestry, beginning in the Meiji Period with expropriation, not only almost totally destroyed this ecosystem, leaving the mountains bare, but also disrupted the takemairi rituals, which disappeared in most communities for decades. From the 1970s onward, mass forestry was replaced by mass tourism for hikers from all over the world, decided again by the “country” against the opinions of islanders, who observed, powerless, a new disruption of their “eco-semiotic system”: a meta-system in which all natural and supernatural realities are interconnected and tend toward a fragile equilibrium, punctuated by phases of rupture.