Mt. Kasuga Primeval Forest

This guide to Mt. Kasuga Primeval Forest in Nara starts with a decree from Emperor Ninmyo in 841 that banned every axe and hunter from this mountain, a ban that held for over a thousand years. It then turns to a single night in 1888 when a typhoon did what no logger ever could, and to the stranger fact that the very people who wrote the law were themselves kept out, the forest staying sealed to ordinary visitors until after the Second World War. Look up at the oak and beech canopy pressing close overhead, some of it older than the decree itself.