Minobu Town Roller Breeding Ground

A Natural Monument With Feathers

On December 21, 1937, the Japanese government extended formal protection to a feature of Minobu that was neither a building nor a relic nor a garden. The designation gathered six places under a single name: the valley districts of Nishidani, Higashidani and Minamidani, the residential quarter of Machikata, the slope known as Uenoyama, and the wooded precincts of Kuon-ji Temple. What tied them together was a bird.

Every year from about May, a roller called the buppōsō arrived in these valleys after a long flight from Southeast Asia. It raised its young in the tall trees of the temple forests and the surrounding slopes, then left again for the south in late September or early October. Minobu was recognized as one of the country's notable breeding grounds for the species, and the protected zone was drawn around the places the bird was known to use.

The Minobu-cho Buppōsō Breeding Ground belongs to a small group of bird habitats that Japan has designated as Natural Monuments. It rewards a visit less for the chance of a sighting, which is now slim, than for the unusual story it carries about how a bird, a sound, and a sacred mountain became entangled.

The Bird That Wears Buddhism's Name

The buppōsō is a compact, broad-winged roller about 30 centimeters long. Its plumage is a deep blue-green, the head and neck darkening almost to black, and a pale patch flashes near the tip of each wing when the bird is in flight. The bill and feet are a bright coral red. In English the species is called the oriental dollarbird, after that round wing patch. It hunts insects on the wing, launching from a high perch and returning to nearly the same spot.

The Japanese name carries more weight than the plain description suggests. "Buppōsō" is written with three characters that name the Three Treasures of Buddhism: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the monastic community. An older alternative name, sanbōchō, means much the same thing, the "three-treasures bird." From the Heian period onward, a clear three-note call heard in mountain forests at night was understood as the syllables bup-pō-sō, a kind of recitation of the sacred formula. The colorful bird often seen by day in temple groves was assumed to be the singer, and poets treated it as a holy creature.

That assumption held for roughly a thousand years, and it was wrong. The buppōsō itself produces only a harsh, grating call, closer to a rough "geh-geh" than to anything devotional. In June 1935, a nationwide radio broadcast from Mt. Hōrai in Aichi Prefecture carried the famous night call to listeners across Japan. A man in Yamanashi who heard it set out to find the source, and the bird he tracked down and shot turned out to be a small owl. Around the same time, the ornithologist Kuroda Nagamichi confirmed the identification with a captive owl that answered the broadcast in the same voice. The true singer was the konohazuku, the oriental scops owl.

Rather than rename either creature, Japanese usage simply split the title in two. The roller became the "buppōsō of appearance," and the owl the "buppōsō of voice." The breeding ground at Minobu protects the bird of appearance, the one early observers could actually see among the cedars.

Why Minobu Was Chosen

The 1937 designation came two years after the radio episode had settled the question of the call. By then there was no ambiguity about which bird was meant. The protected status recognized Minobu specifically as a place where the visible roller gathered and bred in numbers worth safeguarding.

The official criterion behind the listing identifies the buppōsō as a well-known animal of Japan whose preservation, together with its habitat, was considered necessary, even though the species is not unique to the country. Minobu was named alongside a handful of other shrine and temple forests recognized for the same reason, among them the grounds of Suhara Shrine in Gifu, the Mitake area of Kiso in Nagano, and Sano Shrine in Miyazaki.

The link to Kuon-ji is not incidental. The buppōsō favors mature, tall-canopied woodland, and it nests in cavities high in old trees. The cedar forests that cloak Mt. Minobu, tended for centuries as the precinct of a major temple, offered exactly that kind of structure. Across Japan, the bird's old strongholds were repeatedly the wooded groves of shrines and temples, places where large trees were allowed to grow undisturbed. The reverence for the buppōsō as a sacred bird and the survival of its habitat were, in that sense, two sides of the same coin.

Mt. Minobu and Kuon-ji Today

A visitor who comes to the breeding ground today comes, in practice, to Mt. Minobu and the temple at its foot. Kuon-ji is the head temple of the Nichiren school of Buddhism. The priest Nichiren entered this mountain in 1274 and spent his final years here teaching, and the temple that grew around his memorial has drawn pilgrims for more than seven centuries.

The climb to the main hall is itself well known. Beyond the great Sanmon gate, often counted among the three largest temple gates in Japan, the path meets the Bodaitei, a single flight of 287 stone steps so steep it can read as a wall from below. The name links the ascent to the attainment of enlightenment. Gentler routes, the Onna-zaka and Otoko-zaka slopes, climb the same height for those who prefer them, and an inclined elevator runs from one of the car parks for visitors who cannot manage stairs.

At the top stand the main hall and a five-story pagoda. In late March and early April, the temple's weeping cherry trees, famous well beyond Yamanashi, come into bloom. Behind the buildings, the Minobusan Ropeway climbs to the summit ridge at about 1,150 meters, a seven-minute ride that on a clear day opens onto Mt. Fuji, the Southern Alps, and Suruga Bay.

One honest note belongs here. The buppōsō has become scarce across Japan and is listed as a threatened species in the national Red Data Book. At several of the historic breeding grounds, including Minobu, the bird is now rarely seen. Loss of broad-leaved forest, the spread of housing near shrine groves, and a shortage of the old hollow trees it needs for nesting have all played a part. Where nest boxes have been installed, in parts of Hiroshima, Okayama, and southern Nagano, populations have recovered. A visit to Minobu is best understood as a visit to the place where the story happened, and to a working temple mountain still worth the journey on its own terms.

Around Minobu

Minobu sits along the JR Minobu Line, which threads the valley of the Fuji River between Kōfu and the coast near Fuji City. A few stops away lies Shimobe Onsen, a quiet hot-spring town with a long history as a place of recovery and rest. The waters and the wooded setting make it an easy overnight base for a temple visit.

South of the town rises Mt. Shichimen, at nearly 2,000 meters a sacred peak in its own right and the home of a guardian deity associated with Kuon-ji. The pilgrimage route to its summit shrine is demanding, several hours of climbing from the trailhead, and is undertaken by the devout throughout the year.

Minobu also keeps a craft tradition worth seeking out. The Nishijima district has produced handmade washi paper for generations, and Nishijima paper remains one of Yamanashi's recognized local products. It is a reminder that the forests around the mountain shaped not only its wildlife but its working life as well.