Maruyama

This guide to Maruyama in Sapporo questions the signs calling its forest untouched primeval wilderness, tracing the mountain's real past as a stone quarry opened in eighteen seventy-two, then a banned quarry, then an experimental forestry station testing trees for Hokkaido's cold through the eighteen eighties. It follows the slow path to preservation status in nineteen thirteen and national monument status in nineteen twenty-one, and to a visit from botanist Miyabe Kingo and Harvard's Charles Sprague Sargent in eighteen ninety-three. Look up at the katsura and oak too wide to wrap your arms around.