C.W. Nicol is one of Japan’s best-known naturalists and an outspoken critic of Japan’s lamentable management of forests and woodlands.
One of the best-known images of C.W. Nicol is of a ruddy-cheeked, thick-bearded man trekking through dense woodland with a group of young children during a TV commercial for an outdoor-shoe maker. It is an image that illustrates the work of the Welsh-born Japanese national, but also belies it.
Nic, as he prefers to be called, is a sturdy oak of a man known for his outspoken views on Japan’s lamentable management of forests and woodlands. But he looks bashful at mention of his flirtations with the world of commerce.
“I’m not comfortable with that stuff, but it helped to save this,” says the 69-year-old author and naturalist, referring to the 30 hectare tract of woodland near his home in Nagano prefecture. He started buying up the land in 1985, and signed it over to The C.W. Nicol Afan Woodland Trust in 2002.
“I’d done all the talking, but wanted to do something concrete to show I’m not just some mouthy foreigner who enjoys harassing politicians and officials. So I bought the land little by little,” he says. “By handing it over to the trust I felt confident it would be preserved as an example of how forests should be managed, as well as a place to research and teach about nature.”
His confidence has been rewarded. Nic lists dozens of fauna and flora that have returned to the woodland in recent years, including badgers, wild deer, raccoon dogs, bears and 36 species of dragonfly. “At the start there were seven species of sansai [mountain vegetables]. Now there are 137 that have all returned naturally.”
A former professional wrestler who has penned more than 100 books, Nic first came to Japan in 1962 to study karate (he is seventh-dan and still occasionally practices in a compact dojo below his study). His time here has been broken by stretches in Canada, where he worked as a Fisheries Research Board official and, later, an observer aboard Japanese whaling fleets in the Arctic. He also worked in Ethiopia, where he was employed as first director and self-confessed “poacher-puncher” at Simien Mountains National Park.
In Japan, his exasperation with the state of forest management led him to initiate the first, and only, training school for forest rangers. He also inaugurated the Committee to Recreate Healthy Forests in Japan, a citizens group of writers, scholars and forestry specialists whose aim is to raise public awareness about forestry protection and sustainability issues. For more than three decades he has travelled the length and breadth of Japan delivering lectures on environmental preservation.
It is the trust which carries Nic’s name and that of the Afan Argoed Forest Park in Wales, however, that he says most succinctly encapsulates the message he is trying to convey – some 30 years after first realising the neglect in Japan of “human-created woodland that was being raped merely to pay forestry officials’ salaries”.
“The Afan Trust is supporting four families directly through the woodland, and that’s just 30 hectares,” says Nic, whose preservation efforts have been recognised with numerous awards and accolades, and a visit from the United Kingdom’s Prince Charles in 2008. “What if it was 3,000 hectares? What if this was happening all over Japan? I don’t like placing a price on nature, but investing in woodland and increasing biodiversity increases economic possibilities. I have given up on the government doing anything, but hope I can plant seeds in people’s hearts. Individuals are the ones who change things.”
The image of Nic trekking through the woods with children in tow is still apt – only now there is no camera crew directing operations. As part of its “bio-diversification, research and education for all” mandate, the Afan Trust conducts tours for institutionalised children who have suffered mental and physical abuse. The results, says Nic, are astounding.
“We ask the children to draw pictures before and after coming to the woods. Before, you will see humans without faces, homes without windows and real anger in the pictures. After just three days here, they show people smiling, windows with curtains, smoke coming out of a chimney. This has given me real confidence that the woods’ preservation has real and lasting meaning. It demonstrates that woodlands and forests – if used correctly – can not only be a source of wealth and repopulation, but also a place of spiritual healing.”