The mountains of Mie have a long history of dying, but somehow, as they say here, life always finds its way. I’m somewhere in between a David Lynch mystery and a Studio Ghibli epic in these pine-covered mountain ranges with crooked creeks of icy cold water and low-hanging dragon clouds clinging themselves to the mountainsides. Everywhere, there is decay passing by the Toyota pickup’s stained window where I lean my head. It’s not the imminent destruction of war but rather the slow passing of life fading away like sand between my fingers. Abandoned houses, cracks in the asphalt road, a bridge collapsed. The village of Kiwacho Hiradani has twenty-two inhabitants, everyone between seventy and ninety years old. Five decades ago, they were over a hundred. Kids climbed the waterfall to catch fish after a day at the local school while their parents mastered their crafts in pine wood workshops, and grandparents maintained the lush tea and vegetable mountainside gardens. The few handfuls of elders that remain still grow their vegetables, catch fish, and walk the mountain paths, but for whom?

Generations and civilisations fading away is not something new to the mountains of Mie. Already five hundred years ago, during the Edo period, the Kumano pine timber was a highly valued resource in the massive Japanese iconic wooden structures of its time. Old castles and fortifications are shattered across these valleys, erected to protect the lumbering camps from neighbouring warlords, local bandits and rioting farmers. Hiking deeply into the tall, ghastly pine woods, I discover an immense abandoned infrastructure of elevated rice paddies, old moss-covered bridges crossing streams, and whole villages. Built to house and feed thousands of people and left to their own decay as steel, concrete and glass replaced timber frames and rice paper walls. Still, hundreds of years later, these wood structure stands proud. Old planted pink cherry trees and blood-red oaks escaped their manicured garden plantations and are now towering over the ancient remains of humans long gone. Hiking along the old abandoned paths, I watch over the mountain valleys and see another pink-red spot somewhere in the sea of pine swaying in the wind, and I imagine yet another decaying grave.

But life always finds a way, as they say here in the mountains. There is a little bakery on the outskirts of the village; I can’t imagine who finds their way here to buy bread. Still, they make the effort to import the finest flour from Hokkaido and experiment with new seasonal fillings for the curry bread. Because what else is there to do? Almost every weekend, we gather for a spiritual festival; a shrine needs care because the spirits will live on even when the humans are gone. So we better do our best for them. Everyone is doing their best here, my friend, the older Japanese gentleman, tells me before we get back into the Toyota and drive to the roadside twin peakish diner higher up in the mountains. Coffee-and-cake is essential, as are the hotpot dinner parties with homebrew sake and nostalgic love songs. At first, I tried to resist. I came here to hide away from a world dying from global warming, war and hyper-capitalism. I wanted to focus on my writing, computer games, and black-and-white photography. I wanted to be alone, distracted, hidden away, but that’s not how it works here up in the mountains of Mie.