Higashitakane Forest Park

Higashitakane Forest Park sits almost at the geographic centre of Kawasaki, between the Tomei Expressway and a municipal cemetery. It holds one of the Kanto region's last near-natural evergreen oak woods – and a two-thousand-year-old village underneath it. It was found by accident. In the 1960s, developers clearing the hillside for housing turned up the remains of pit dwellings: a settlement occupied from the late Yayoi period through to the late Kofun, with somewhere between one hundred and one hundred fifty dwellings estimated across the site. The surrounding stand of shirakashi (Japanese evergreen oak), some trees 150 to 200 years old, proved equally valuable. In 1971 the prefecture designated the settlement a Historic Site and the wood a Natural Monument, then protected the whole area as a park.

The layers now sit directly on top of each other. The Ancient Lawn Square at the top of the hill is an ordinary open lawn, good for picnics – with the village sleeping directly beneath it.

Below, a wooden boardwalk crosses a wetland garden. The ground here was rice paddy two thousand years ago, farmed – tradition holds – by the Yayoi-era people who lived on the plateau above, using tools made from the surrounding oak. The park still grows rice on it today, planting in May, harvesting in October, and pounding the crop into mochi at an event each November. Weirs regulate the water depth and temperature across the marsh, so irises and other wetland flowers each grow in the conditions that suit them.

The shirakashi wood is the park's real distinction. Evergreen oak forest once covered the plateaus of the Kanto region broadly, and development has taken most of it; here it survives close to its natural state. Alongside grows a second, quite different wood of kunugi and konara – the classic Japanese coppice – where around fifty species of wild bird pass through over the course of a year. There's a picnic clearing here too, and on a clear day, a view of Mount Fuji.

The rest fills in around these: a lookout reached by stone steps, a stream where plum blooms in spring, a lily garden, and an ancient plants garden grouping species by how they were used – food, clothing, dye, medicine – from the Jomon period to the Heian. An information centre at the entrance posts what's currently in bloom.