Oguni Cedar

Oguni Town lies at the northern tip of Kumamoto Prefecture, on the outer side of the Aso caldera's rim, where central-northern Kyushu rises into the skirts of the Aso highlands. Geothermal heat and biomass shape daily farming and forestry here, and cedar plantations form the backbone of the surrounding hills. The woodland is old: generations of planting have left stands of many ages, including high, long-grown cedar. Where the forest is well tended the interior stays bright, undergrowth spreads across the floor, and the shrub layer fills in — enough for scarce plants such as the orchid kiebine to take hold. In the sawtooth-oak groves near the hamlets, birds like the pale thrush and the daurian redstart pass the winter. This is the ground that produces Oguni cedar.

For roughly 270 years, families in Oguni Town have raised the cedar now carried under the name Oguni cedar. The head of the local forest cooperative still keeps a stand of cedar about 270 years old, remembered as the place where Oguni's forestry began. That long horizon is practical as much as sentimental: cedar planted by one generation is cut and sold by a later one, so the work is organised to hand living forest forward rather than to clear it at once. The town calls itself a forestry town, and the cooperative that anchors the trade was founded in 1951.

Oguni handles cedar from the mountain to the finished piece through its forest cooperative, a body of 34 staff as of April 2025, working across forest maintenance, planning and sales, general affairs, and cadastral survey. The cooperative runs a planning-and-sales desk, so logs reaching the market are not the end of its work; it carries the wood on into planning, manufacture, and sale. Umeki Takahiro, who grew up in Oguni and joined in 1994, spent years on the mountain side before moving to that desk in 2017; Irimajiri Ritsuka, who studied forest policy and moved to the town in 2012, works on telling the forest's story. Felling, hauling, sawing, and woodworking connect through the same organisation, and the cooperative took on a retiring craftsman's woodworking machinery through his apprentice. Nearby, the Oguni Woody Cooperative keeps a large modern sawmill that cuts and sells the same cedar.

In the 1980s the town built a plan around using its own wood, and thinned cedar — the smaller trees removed so the rest can grow — went into public buildings. The roadside station known as Yu Station and the Oguni Dome both came out of that program. The dome's roof is a wooden space-truss assembled from 5,602 Oguni-cedar members; because a timber frame on that scale sat outside the ordinary building rules of the day, it went up only after strength testing backed a special permission. Walking into these buildings, residents and visitors meet the town's cedar overhead rather than on a shelf.

Before Oguni cedar leaves the valley it is dried using local geothermal heat, the same underground warmth that marks the town's farming and bathing. The cooperative's forests carry SGEC forest-management certification in part, and the wood can be traced back to where it grew — practical habits that keep the hillsides productive rather than idle. The town's logic is plain: the surest way to protect a well-managed cedar forest is to keep selling what it yields, so Oguni works to hold and raise its timber shipments, and a carbon-offset scheme adds value to the standing forest to help pay for its upkeep.

Cut and dried, the cedar shows a pale pink face that makes it easy to recognise in boards and panelling. Denser, heavier logs become structural timber, and sheets of it are pressed into structural plywood made entirely of Oguni cedar, which has gone into interiors at Aso Kumamoto Airport, where the cooperative also laid out a zone of Oguni-cedar furniture. The same tree reaches people at smaller scale too — turned and jointed woodwork, decorative and interior panels, large and special-sized pieces for particular jobs, and even an aroma oil drawn from the wood. From a roof truss to a bottle of oil, the range stays rooted in one town's hillsides.