There's a deep, lush forest close to the center of Tokyo. The trees grow on the grounds of Meiji Shrine, and as soon as you're under them you're in a world of tranquility, away from the hustle and bustle of the big city.

The trees were planted there about 80 years ago, so it's an artificial forest. But it certainly looks like an old, natural forest. This was the intention of Honda Seiroku, the man in charge of the tree planting. He is now called the father of afforestation in Japan.

After the demise of Emperor Meiji (1852-1912), it was decided that a shrine should be built in his honor. The land that was chosen, about 72 hectares in area, was owned by the Imperial Household. It was mostly fields and unused open space, and the biggest challenge facing the planners was to find a good way to change it all into a forest.

For century after century, the Japanese had looked on nature with a sense of awe and reverence. For them, the forest was a rich resource offering many valuable things needed for survival, but it could also be a deep, dark, fearsome place where gods and spirits lived. This explains why almost every shrine — a place where a god is venerated — is surrounded by trees.

So Meiji Shrine needed not only buildings but a forest as well. Honda decided to develop the land around the buildings so that, in 100 years, the open space would have evolved into a forest. His basic plan involved two stages.

The first stage was to plant trees that would grow well in Tokyo's natural environment. For the primary tree type, Honda chose evergreen broadleaves like shii (chinquapin), kashi (evergreen oak), and kusu (camphor tree). He decided to intersperse these with deciduous broadleaves like keyaki (zelkova) and kunugi (another variety of oak). People from different parts of the country took broadleaved trees from the wild and donated them — 365 varieties, 100,000 trees in all. A total of about 110,000 young volunteers came from all over Japan to plant them.

The second stage was natural regeneration. The idea here was to let nature take its course after the planting was done. In other words, the trees were allowed to grow and reproduce without human intervention. The planting was completed in 1920, six years after the decision to build a shrine. The natural regeneration plan has been followed ever since.

"All we do is keep watch over the trees growing on their own, and help them remain in a natural state," says Okizawa Koji, a horticulturist administering the shrine forest. If a tree falls over it is allowed to rot where it is and return to the earth. All leaves falling on pathways are gathered and dropped on the forest floor. Nothing is taken out of the forest, nothing is brought in. Everything is left to nature — that is the philosophy behind managing the woodland.

Under the law of survival of the fittest, the number of tree varieties has dropped to an estimated 247. But today more than 170,000 trees are growing there, in the largest wooded area in the 23 cities of Tokyo.