If you live in the colder parts of the world, you would know how beautiful it is to see trees covered with snow the morning after a heavy snowfall. It is like the winter wonderland is upon us once again. It especially looks great in the summers when you are sweating hard and looking back at the fond memories of last winters. But, if you live there, you may also know that branches of the really big trees get broken under the extreme weight of the snow piling up on top of them and sometimes, contribute to the downing of an entire tree.
But, the Japanese have had solutions for this problem for an incredible four hundred years. What they do is take long bamboo poles and attach a number of ropes from top to the ground like a tent except that they encompass the tree’s branches instead of some tent canvas. In this way, the trees don’t get crushed under the ever-increasing pressure of snow there.
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Now we can’t do that with every tree we have. There are hundreds of thousands of trees in every city. The Yukitsuri, as this process is called, is the most standard method used in the Land of the Rising Sun. It literally translates into tree suspenders and that is what they are meant to be. It is only done on older trees and vulnerable ones that Japanese find endangered in the next snowy conditions. The practice was started way back in the 1600s though the historians aren’t sure who actually invented them. The process starts each year in November gets completed in a month just before snow starts. One spring starts, the suspenders are taken down and the natural feeling of the place comes back into place. The Japanese know how to do things right, don’t they?
