The Monsters on Yakushima's Mocchomu-dake

Boasting fairytale waterfalls, relentless rain forests, and giant cedars older than Jesus, the Japanese island of Yakushima is a dense display of natural mystique. Spring each year sees the return of sea turtles to Inakahama Beach, where the females lay their eggs in the same spot they themselves hatched 25 or 30 years prior. Wild monkeys sit in the road along the western Seibu-Rindo, staring down motorists, daring them to hit them while the deer quickly turn tail and disappear into the woods.

And then there's the rain - as much as 8 meters annually in some places. This soil-soaking climate contributes not only to the hardiness of those multi-millenial cedars but to moss-covered forestscapes so captivating you're bound to fill up your memory card.

I'd wanted to see Yakushima since the moment I knew it existed. I was so intrigued with the whole rain-soaked package that by 2004 I was ready to cycle the 400 miles from Osaka through Shikoku to Kagoshima where I would pedal right onto the Yakushima ferry and cycle and hike the hell out of the place - and then cycle home, all in the space of my upcoming two-week winter break.

Instead, in a strange and sudden change of heart, I put on a suit and tie, bought a box of tangerines, and hopped a train north to Fukushima to ask a peach farmer for his permission to marry his daughter.

A potentially ruinous turn of events, but thirteen years and three kids later I finally found myself on my way to Yakushima, as a guide on a two-week cycling tour that would end with a one-day, 100-kilometer circuit of this mystical, monkey-ridden island. No matter I'd never been there. "Just follow your Garmin, guys."

We pedaled past waterfalls; negotiated the monkeys along the Seibu-Rindo and spotted several deer (more specifically, their asses as they ran away); had lunch on the pale yellow sands of Nagatahama Beach (it wasn't nesting season); and gazed on those mountains of age-old cedar from afar. Not bad for a day's work, but seeing those ancient forests up close demanded I head off on my own after the tour.

Badgered by vague recollections of a small number of small children waiting for me back at home in Nagano I thought making the three-day traverse over the top of the island would amount, according the vague female voice shouting at me over my thoughts, to an unforgivable shirking of fatherly responsibility. So I set out instead a day hike up the relatively modest mountain known as Mocchomu-dake, which probably doesn’t mean “forest with some crazy shit” but it very well could.

Why Shouldn't You Go Hiking with a Strained Oblique?

I'll give you one reason.

I’d been itching to get out and climb Mt. Hachibuse for weeks. Then suddenly the day came. The sun was rising bright in the sparkling sky; immediate responsibilities, both parental and professional, were nil; the car keys were just sitting there.

My wife yelled in my general direction as I was pulling out of the driveway; something about one of the kids and a piano lesson. “One of my kids takes piano lessons?” I sped along Route 63, winding along the foot of the mountain range that culminates in this curious, non-descript peak I was rushing toward.

Honestly, I don’t know why I wanted to climb Hachibuse-yama. Of all the countless mountains around here it is nowhere near the highest. It is nothing you could call dramatic. There’s a road that takes you within a half mile of the top. Hachibuse means ‘prostrating bowl’ for Pete’s sake.

If I'm careful what could possibly go wrong?

If you decide to hike the short trail (built for those of us with a wife who needs the car later) you'll find it meanders through the woods until, halfway up the mountain, it spits you out onto the road. As if suddenly aware that it wasn’t supposed to be playing in the street, the trail quickly dips back into the woods. Then as if it were one of my kids it forgets it isn’t supposed to be playing in the street and runs out onto the pavement once again. At this point the trail turns into a squirrel in a panic, running into and out of and into and out of traffic’s way until it finally dies like road kill at the blacktop’s edge.

From there it’s a twenty-minute walk along the rocky shoulder, up to the parking lot where the smart people start walking.