Forest Bathing — A path to making your visit to Japan (or anywhere) more enjoyable.

Leave it to the Japanese to come up with a term as beautiful as the actual feeling of being immersed in nature — forest bathing.

Forest bathing (shinrin-yoku) is the practice of mindfully immersing yourself in a forest or natural woodland setting using all five senses, not for exercise or hiking distance, but purely to slow down and absorb the atmosphere — the sounds, smells, light, and textures of the trees around you.

The term itself is only a few decades old — Japan’s Forestry Agency coined it in 1982, at the height of the country’s rapid urbanization and overwork culture (Japan even has a word, karoshi, for death from overwork). The idea was simple: get stressed, overworked people back into the forests their ancestors had always lived alongside, and see what happened. What happened, according to the research that followed, was measurable — lower cortisol, lower blood pressure, a shift toward the parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) side of the nervous system, and even a boost in immune activity, thought to be linked to compounds trees release into the air. It turns out the forest wasn’t just a nice backdrop. It was doing something. You can find more information on the research here.

Here’s what makes this practice so perfectly suited to a Japan itinerary: you don’t have to choose between the cities and the wilderness to experience it. Walk ten minutes from Harajuku Station — past the crowds, the food stands, the line for the thrift shops — and you’ll pass under a torii gate into a forest of 100,000 trees, planted by 110,000 volunteers in 1920, donated from every corner of the country. It’s Meiji Jingu, and it sits in the middle of one of the busiest cities on Earth. The traffic noise disappears before you’ve gone fifty yards.

For the Hikers: An Even Deeper Immersion

If you’re a hiker, buckle up. Forests cover roughly two-thirds of Japan — about 62 million acres, or 68% of the country’s total land area — which is a paradise for hikers and a chance for the transportation engineers to show off their considerable skills (the roads that connect them are fantastic). And the sights you’ll hit on those trails aren’t the kind you stumble into anywhere else. You’ll find a full list of Japan’s 35 national parks here.

During our first trip to Japan, we primarily hiked around the Five Lakes area with Mt. Fuji watching over the whole affair – it is as formidable as advertised. During our visit last month we did quite a bit of hiking in northern Japan. We climbed to the summit of Mt. Hachimantai outside Morioka to see the Dragon’s Eye — a crater lake that spends winter buried in snow, then thaws unevenly each spring, leaving a ring of white around a startling blue center that looks, unmistakably, like an eye staring back up at you from the mountain. There was Kegon Falls in Nikko, the five-colored lakes of Goshikinuma in Urabandai, Oirase Gorge outside Aomori, Cape Kamui outside Otaru, and Lake Shikotsu in Shikotsu-Toya National Park — where, as far as we could tell, we had the entire trail system to ourselves. (I’d also like to state, for the record, that I can now pronounce all of these correctly, which took some doing.)

Not Quite City, Not Quite Backcountry

But you don’t have to choose between skyline and summit — some of the best forest bathing opportunities in Japan live in the space between. Take Chūson-ji, the temple complex tucked into a cedar forest so old and so dense it feels like the trees were consulted on the architecture. Or the World Heritage shrines and temples of Nikko, where centuries-old cedars frame the buildings so completely that it’s hard to say whether you’re looking at a religious site or a forest that happens to have some very elaborate buildings in it. These are the places where cultural immersion and awe-inspiring nature stop being two separate items on your itinerary and just become one experience.

That’s the thing about forest bathing in Japan — you don’t have to go looking for it. It’s built into the shrines, folded into the cities, and waiting for you on the trails. All you have to do is show up with enough time in your itinerary to actually stand still. I can help with that. Let me know if you’d like to start that conversation.