The first place I went was Hachikuniryokuchi, which is the of one of the parks around Sayama. It means, roughly, "8 country mountain tract of land."
Trails were spacious, but in fact the woods were very dense and intense.
It's not actually called a park, though. That last word, ryokuchi, really does translate as "tract of land".
Most everything around Sayama is owned by Seibu Corporation, one of the developer+railroad+department store chains we have here in Japan. Because these parks aren't really parks, it made me wonder if the parks are just private land owned by Seibu? It's also suspicious in that regard that the website for the park system is http://www.sayamaparks.com/ (note, .com)
The other awesome thing about this whole area is the number of birds in the tree canopy. It was loud everywhere, just thousands of birds chirping away. It really made it feel like the wilderness even though (because the park is narrow) you're rarely more than a half a kilometer from civilization.
All day I kept seeing amazing mushrooms just growing wild in the forest. That's right, this is a mushroom, not a flower.
This is a high school located next door to the park. What an awesome location for a school! Of course, the students probably think it's boring and wish they were in central Tokyo.
A lot of the trail had these nice paving stones on them.
Stones in the sunlight.
Another mushroom.
There were a whole bunch of these mushroom groups sunning themselves.
Macro focus on the digital camera can be handy!
The branch all those mushrooms were on.
Most, though not all, of the trails had these little fenceposts alongside. So orderly, so Japanese!
At the far end of Hachikuniyamaryokuchi, the park gets very narrow and is surrounded on both sides by newly built, expensive houses. I wondered if the park used to be bigger and these houses will built on former park land, sigh. Anyway, in that part of the park the path got very, very nicely paved.
Yet another.
After leaving Hachikuniyamaryokuchi, I saw this umbrella hanging on a limb in a small separated piece of forest. An offering to the forest spirits?
Near the Shimoyamaguchi citizen's forest, I came upon this Shinto shrine. If I remember the first Kanji right, it was Ikimono Jinja.
They had a nice, largely empty building at the base.
But the key part of this shrine was a very steep, very small hill in the middle. It was maybe 25 meters high, but only 35 meters around at the base. You took these stone stairs up...
They switch back and forth up the hill.
And switch back and forth some more...
There's an engraved marker stone of some kind on the way up.
And when you come out on the top, you can see way back down to the Torii (as well as Tokyo in the distance). As always with "how high it was" pictures, it's hard to realize how much the camera was pointing down when I took this picture.
And of course off the other side of the shrine's hill, you can see... Seibu Dome (where the Seibu Lions baseball team plays).
...And the Seibu amusement park.
Another trail up into the wilderness, this one at the park near Sayama Dam, the dam that creates lake Sayama.
A more overgrown trail.
At the top of that trail is a hill where you can see Lake Sayama (sayama-ko).
You can also see this mysterious black monolith. There's no writing or explanation on it.
There's also this impressive but superfluous arbor-like structure. Future generations will dig this up and futilely ponder what meaning it could have had.
In fact, current generations might futilely ponder the same thing.
Another place near this spot had these very, very overgrown steps leading down. This is definitely where Mei saw Totoro!
Out near the lake, a couple people were stirring up the short grass and trying to catch something with nets (butterflies? I couldn't tell).
I just have an irrational love of decrepit buildings. You can't see in the picture, but this building was totally abandoned inside -- you could see straight through. I always think of buying it and turning it into the office for a software company or something.
The other side of the same building. It's hard to tell they're really the same structure, huh?
While walking past this restaurant...
I saw a rabbit sitting in a parking lot!
It's a real rabbit, not a statue or something, I saw it moving a little bit. It was pretty acclimated to people; it was nervous about me but didn't move. I wonder if the restaurant keeps it as a pet? You would think dogs would chase it though.
Here's the dam on Tamako, the other lake near Sayama.
And some of the lake. There are actually two dams.
This is the view down from the upper dam -- you can see the lower dam a ways downstream. Not a lot of water in the lower lake!
Yet another fascinating fungus.
A view south from the trail along the south shore of Tama-ko.
A very shed-like building along the trail.
A substantial part of the trail along the south side of Tama-ko had this extensive elevated construction. The ground was a little bit soft, but it didn't seem soft enough to justify all this work.
The wood had rotted through and been patched in many places.
A nice sample of flora along the trail.