My daily ritual of taking a walk on the wild side has a name in Japanese culture, shinrin-yoku or “forest bathing”.
I learned this one bright and sunny late-winter’s day when I stopped in the Waterworks Reserve to chat with a visitor photographing birds.
The photographer had set out to find the elusive pink robin and, seeing my binoculars and noting I was a birder, he asked where he might find the species.
As happens when birders meet, the conversation soon started to stray along a wandering course, a bit like the trails we eventually explored together.
The visitor was originally from Tasmania but had spent the past 30 years living in Japan. Hence his knowledge of shinrin-yoku, a term which emerged in Japan in the 1980s as a physiological and psychological exercise. It soon became both a fitness trend and a mindfulness practice.
My new friend, Marcus, had a good reason to extol its virtues. He had survived first a heart attack and then a related stroke. He still carried a pacemaker in his chest.
“After my heart attack, stroke, and continuing rehabilitation, spending time in forests and finding birds was probably the only way I could reset my brain each day,’’ he said.
“Doctors should recommend patients to spent time in forests and connect to nature – wind, noise, birds, aroma, and light.”
The birder from Japan had been in Hobart for a holiday, staying with his brother in South Hobart and walked to the reserve from there each day, a round trip of about six kilometres.
While Japan is credited with the term shinrin-yoku, the concept at the heart of the practice is not new. Many cultures have long recognised the importance of the natural world to human health. But purveyors of the art of shinrin-yoku have given the practice an advanced definition. They say the purpose is twofold: to offer an eco-antidote to tech-boom burnout and to inspire residents to reconnect with and protect the country’s forests.
In the 1980s the Japanese quickly embraced this form of ecotherapy and subsequent research reached the simple conclusion that time spent immersed in nature was good for people.
Forest bathing is not just for the wilderness-lover; the practice can be as simple as walking in any natural environment and consciously connecting with what’s around you.
A walk in the woods might have been beneficial to my new friend and myself but there was a certain frustration in that we failed to find the pink robin.
Having given up the hunt, we sat on a fallen tree fashioned as a bench at the top end of the reserve to continue our conversation.
At that point a male pink robin in freshly minted spring plumage flew over our heads and perched in a nearby tree, singing merrily. And my new-found friend snapped a photograph he now treasures back in Japan.