Toriyano Reverse Bush

Toyano Sakasadake no Yabu: A Grove Where the Bamboo Grows Backwards

In a quiet residential pocket of Niigata City, a roughly one-hectare grove of henon bamboo holds a botanical oddity that has puzzled visitors for centuries. Look closely at the slender green culms and you will find branches that do not reach upward toward the light. Instead they bend at the joint and droop, some curving gently, others snapping down at a sharp angle, as though the whole plant were planted the wrong way up. This is the sakasadake, the "reverse bamboo," and the grove that produces it was designated a National Natural Monument of Japan on October 12, 1922.

The official name of the site is Toyano Sakasadake no Yabu, which translates roughly as "the Reverse Bamboo Thicket of Toyano." It stands on the former grounds of Saihoji, a temple of the Otani branch of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism that has since moved a short distance away. The grove is one of very few places in Japan protected specifically because the plants growing there refuse to behave the way bamboo normally does.

The Legend of Shinran's Walking Staff

The reverse bamboo cannot be discussed without the figure who, by local tradition, created it. Shinran (1173 to 1262) was the founder of Jodo Shinshu, one of the largest schools of Buddhism in Japan. In 1207, after the imperial court banned the exclusive practice of the nembutsu, the recitation of Amida Buddha's name, Shinran was stripped of his priestly status and exiled to Echigo Province, the old name for present-day Niigata.

According to the founding history kept by Saihoji, Shinran first lived near Gochi Kokubunji in what is now Joetsu, then moved north to Toyano around 1209 and remained there for roughly three years until his pardon. The flat, water-laced country around the Toyano lagoon became the setting for a cluster of legends about him.

The bamboo story runs like this. Shinran, preaching in Toyano, thrust his bamboo walking staff into the ground and declared that if the teaching he carried truly accorded with the will of the Buddha, the dead stick would put down roots and sprout. It did. The withered staff took root, sent up shoots, and grew into a flourishing thicket. Because the staff had been planted with what would have been its tip pointing down, the legend says, the bamboo it became carried that inversion forever in its drooping branches. A stand of bamboo growing from a discarded staff, its branches pointing the wrong way, was exactly the kind of marvel that an exiled holy man was expected to leave behind.

One of the Seven Wonders of Echigo

The reverse bamboo belongs to a famous set of regional curiosities known as the Seven Wonders of Echigo, also called the Seven Wonders of Shinran. Echigo was Shinran's place of exile, and Jodo Shinshu later took deep root across the province. Over the generations, people came to read unusual plants and animals as auspicious signs left in the wake of the holy man's travels, and a number of these were gathered into the canonical "seven."

Within the boundaries of modern Niigata City alone there are three: the reverse bamboo of Toyano, the scorched crucian carp said to have revived in a pond, and a curiously fused nutmeg-yew tree. Other wonders, including a chestnut that fruits three times a year, a cherry hung with rosary-bead fruit, a plum that blossoms in clusters of eight, and a one-sided reed, survive in the surrounding region. Visiting the reverse bamboo is, in effect, calling on one stop along an old devotional circuit that traces the memory of Shinran across the Niigata plain.

Why the Grove Became a Protected Site

Legend explains the meaning of the reverse bamboo, but its legal protection rests on botany. The plant is a form of hachiku, or henon bamboo, in which the branches twist downward instead of rising. A normal bamboo branch grows up and out from the joint where it meets the culm. In the reverse bamboo, that branch bends back on itself, drooping below the horizontal so the foliage hangs down. Botanists classify the trait as a kind of weeping deformity, and a grove that reliably produces it is genuinely rare.

In 1922, the plant scientist Manabu Miyoshi (1861 to 1939), a professor at Tokyo Imperial University and a leading figure in Japan's early movement to protect natural monuments, examined the Toyano grove. His survey supported its designation that same year under the criterion covering habitats of rare or endangered plants. The reverse bamboo was protected not as a single tree but as an entire self-renewing thicket, a living population in which the unusual trait keeps reappearing.

What still has not been settled is the cause. Modern explanations for the downward-bending branches range from genetic mutation to the weight of heavy Niigata snow to insect damage, and no single theory has been confirmed. The Niigata city authorities, who manage the grove, are candid that the reason the branches bend remains unknown. That open question is part of what makes a walk through the thicket quietly compelling.

What to Look For When You Visit

The first thing to understand is that not every bamboo in the grove is a reverse bamboo. The thicket is an ordinary-looking stand of henon bamboo, and the reverse specimens are scattered through it. Finding them is the point of the visit, and it rewards a slow, attentive pace rather than a quick loop.

Niigata City defines a reverse bamboo simply: if even a single branch has its tip hanging lower than its base, the plant counts. A survey conducted in March 2008 identified roughly 780 such bamboo and marked each with a band of pale blue vinyl tape, so the tape is your best guide. Younger bamboo that has grown since then may also show the trait without any marker, and you are welcome to hunt for unrecorded examples yourself.

The way a branch bends falls into three rough types. In the curved type, the branch dips below horizontal only toward its far end. In the acute-angle type, the branch kinks sharply at the first joint near its base so the whole branch hangs down steeply; this is considered the true reverse bamboo. A third, zigzag type bends at the joints along the branch rather than at the base. A single plant rarely has all its branches bent. Far more often only some branches droop, and a few of those may be high up the culm, so it pays to look toward the canopy as well as at eye level.

The grove doubles as a refuge for wildlife. Surrounded by houses, it has become an untouched scrap of woodland where wild birds nest, including birds said to have moved here after river engineering work along the Shinano River disturbed their former habitat. On a still day the thicket is filled with birdsong, and the bamboo canopy is dense enough that a light rain barely reaches the path below.

Around the Grove

A short walk from the thicket stands Saihoji itself, the Jodo Shinshu temple connected to the Shinran legend, with the grove occupying a detached portion of its former precincts. A weathered temple gate left from the era when the temple stood on this spot still marks the approach, and a slender, youthful statue of Shinran rises on a high stone base within the grove, unusual in showing him without the traveler's straw hat and cape. The temple holds an annual Saihoji festival on the fourth weekend of April, a cheerful neighborhood occasion.

The grove sits in central Niigata, close to the broad Toyano lagoon, a wetland that gives this part of the city its low, watery character. Central Niigata also offers the elegant grounds of Hakusan Park, the historic district around the former Niigata Customs House near the port, and the restaurants and shops of the Furumachi quarter. Travelers with more time can extend a Shinran-themed itinerary outward, since several of the other Echigo wonders lie within a day's reach across the plain.