Bamboo Forest Maintenance

From early summer to early winter, we perform maintenance works of a bamboo forest and other surrounding forests in Oire, Sakura, Tochigi Prefecture with our students. For this purpose, we have short courses where Tadashi Yagisawa teaches weeding, maintenance of logging roads, thinning, and elimination of ill bamboos. Early winter is the season for bamboo harvesting and Tadashi helps his students harvest by teaching how to use tools and to select bamboos. We maintain surrounding forests in addition to the bamboo forest because we want to enhance the cultural value of the region as a whole, which is called a Satoyama, literary 'home hill', where Japanese rich rural culture has been nurtured, and because we want to express our gratitude to the land owner, who kindly allows us to harvest bamboos, as well as, we need to keep surrounding forests from causing adverse influences to the bamboo forest.