Kammui x Teva | Kenjiro Yamashita

The Job

Project

Teva ×
Kammui — featuring Yamashita Kenjiro

Client

Teva
(Deckers Japan)

Talent

Yamashita Kenjiro,
LDH Japan

Location

Zako River,
Okushiga Gorge, Nagano

the film

The Mission

prove Teva belongs on real terrain, not a studio floor.

The Talent

Yamashita Kenjiro, learning to cast for the first time on camera.

The Setting

Okushiga and the Zako River. The largest virgin forest in Japan.

the people

Partner

Kammui

Fly Fishing Guide

Takahiko Seki

Trekking Guide

Nakayama Hiroyuki

Production

SET K.K.

the terrain

The Vehicle

fly fishing. A sport with no shortcuts and no easy poses.

The Expert

Takahiko Seki. Local expertise and technical credibility.

The Mandate

Adventure.
Not an ad. — Create a film that reads as an adventure. Not a commercial pretending to be one.

Production Diary

With every project, there's the shoot, the video you're making, and then there are the extra things that you experience and learn along the way that were never part of the brief, but leave a stronger impression and stick with you longer.

On this trip in particular our guide Nakayama Hiroyuki provided that experience. After Yamashita Kenjiro left on his shoot day, the crew stuck around for another day to shoot B-roll and brainstorm potential future projects. Together with Kammui's CEO Max McKee, we set out on a hike along the Zako River in Okushiga.

The day before we had literally walked through the Zako River, the main body of water in the region, which despite being in the middle of summer was a very chilly 10 degrees Celsius. Our hike on the second day took us up into the surrounding mountains, where we were always looking down on the river. The steepness of the slopes and the gentle grade of the Zako River created this surreal perspective where sometimes even when you were looking straight ahead it felt like you were looking straight down. Huge expanses of river and virgin forest seemed both incredibly far away and close enough to touch.

The Zako River itself is crystal clear so you can see right down to the river bed, the green tuff. The green tuff itself was once seabed. In fact, the entire gorge once sat 6000 meters underwater. The tectonic collisions that pushed the Japanese archipelago up above sea level dragged the ancient seafloor into daylight. Over the millennia since, the Zako River has slowly eroded the rock revealing fossilized fish and sea creatures from millions of years ago.

On both sides of the river, a giant forest spread out as far as you could see. It’s the largest virgin forest in Japan. In this particular part of the forest, one kind of tree stands out among the others. Nakayama calls it the “forest mother” because of its unique role in the ecosystem. The buna, or beech tree, grows very straight and very tall with very few branches below the canopy. This leaves lots of room underneath for flowers, smaller plants, insects, birds, and bears. The buna is the forest mother because it supplies these creatures with life-giving “milk” in the form of massive amounts of stored water. Up to eight tons at any given time, apparently. And because the trees hold so much water, the forest is particularly resistant to droughts. The vibrant ecosystem below the canopy also means strong root systems, so the area isn’t prone to erosion like huge portions of Japan’s mountains, which are filled with cedar trees.

We know all this today because ecologists have studied the forests, but there's an ironic background to the buna trees in Japan. The cedar trees that block out sun and drop pine needles that prevent forest floor growth were actually planted in huge numbers after World War II to support the need for lumber. The buna trees on the other hand? They weren’t considered useful because they contain so much water that their wood isn’t suitable for construction. The kanji for buna really solidifies their role in Japan at the time. It’s a single character split into two parts: on the left, “tree”; on the right, “nothing.” Buna — the “non-tree.” The forest mother was so worthless to industrial expansion it wasn’t even considered a real tree.

Nakayama feels that this labeling of the buna tree points to a shift in Japan. Before the Meiji era, the mid-1800s, there was no word for nature. Not a word that collectively referred to it. Up until then, most Japanese people lived in close proximity to nature. Though Japanese was rich with words for all the things in nature, they didn't have a use to refer to it collectively. Only an outsider would need to clumsily lump all the rivers, mountains, plants, insects, and animals together.

The word we have now, “shizen,” was something that came at a time when Japan was modernizing and importing ideas, concepts and new words from Western culture. “Shizen” literally means “to exist as is.” For Nakayama-san, it has a slightly more nefarious connotation, “not yet exploited.”

Was life in pre-modern Japan this idyllic coexistence between mankind and nature, and is modern Japan totally out of touch? Did Western ideas and culture spoil a rural utopia? Not by a long shot, but driving back into Tokyo, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from the largest virgin forest in Japan, is a bit of a mind-blowing experience.

In Okushiga, we swam against the rapid current of a crystal clear river that ran the length of a narrow valley through steep mountain slopes. Driving back into Tokyo, we sped along an elevated highway, sandwiched between rows of high-rise apartment buildings. I love both of these places, and the fact that you can go between them in a day is one of the things that I love best about living here, and it's one of the things that I often tell people makes Japan, Japan.