> "Asked about his relationship to the cypress trees that are cultivated for the shrine, Ikeda, the lumber expert, had a one-word answer: “Deep.”

Forty years ago, when he was 24, he drove his grandfather to participate in the tree-felling ceremony. “He said to me, ‘Do you know that the trees cry?’

“I answered, ‘No way, how could a tree cry?’”

But as they watched woodsmen chop down the cypress, “the sound of the axes echoed across the mountains, and after about an hour, when the axe struck the core of the tree, the scent of the cypress filled the air, flowing like blood,” he said.

At the final axe stroke, as the wood snapped, “the sound it made was like a shriek, a high-pitched ‘keee’ sound, and then the tree fell with a thunderous thud. In that moment, I thought, ‘Ah... it really cried.’ I felt as if the tree wept, mourning its own life, as if it knew its life was precious.”"

This was like sipping hot tea in the rain.