What Kyoto Bamboo Forest Taught Me About Belonging

I woke up before sunrise that morning in Kyoto and left the hotel while the streets were still relatively empty and quiet. I wanted to reach the Arashiyama bamboo grove before the crowds came in. The air was cool, and everything felt peaceful at that hour.

When I entered the grove, the first thing I noticed was the silence. Then the wind moved through the bamboo, and I heard the stalks brushing against each other. It wasn’t loud, but it was mesmerizing. It reminded me of the sound of a longhouse at dusk, when voices blend together and settle into the evening.

The bamboo rose high above me, straight and close together. Light filtered through in narrow strips. I walked slowly, not really thinking about anything in particular. At some point, I stopped and placed my hand on one of the stalks. It was smooth and cool. Solid, even though it looked so light when it moved in the wind. Standing there, I felt so calm and that feeling stayed with me as I kept walking.

It also reminded me of something my cousin told me last year about the bungai, a concept in Iban tradition. In Iban traditional belief, the bungai is often described as a plant-image connected to a person’s life. It exists in the unseen world, under the care of Manang Menjaya, the Iban god of healing. She told me that the bungai often takes the form of bamboo. It grows in clumps from a shared root. Each stalk represents a person and they are all connected in a clump. At the time, I found it difficult to grasp the concept and brushed it aside. But walking through the bamboo grove, I started to realize something.

I could see how each bamboo stalk stood on its own, but none of them grew alone. They all came from the same root system underground. You don’t see it when you walk through the forest, but it’s there, holding everything together. That made me think about my own life.

I’m Iban, born in Sarawak, but I’ve spent many years living away from my homeland and my roots. For a long time, I felt like I had grown away from where I started. Like I had been cut off and placed somewhere else. But standing there, that didn’t feel true anymore. It started to dawn on me that my root is still there, even if I can’t see it.

I thought about my family, my relatives in the longhouse by the Layar River, and how we are still connected in ways that aren’t always visible. The bungai grows, weakens, and changes, but the clump remains. That idea stayed with me as I continued walking. I passed by Nonomiya Shrine, then followed the path further until I reached the quieter parts of the grove. By then, more people had started to arrive. The silence began to break, but the feeling didn’t disappear completely.

Before leaving, I stopped for tea at Okochi-Sanso Garden. Sitting there, looking out over Kyoto, I thought again about what the bamboo had shown me. We don’t grow alone no matter how solitary we feel. Even when we live far from our homeland or when life takes us in different directions, the connection to our roots doesn’t disappear. We just don’t see or feel it.

I used to think distance meant disconnection, but now I see differently. We are still part of the same clump, drawing from the same roots, even when we are far from each other.

Note: Moso bamboos are running bamboos, but they have similar root systems to clump bamboos. All pictures are from my trip to Japan and the text in this post (like most of my past posts) is extracted from my journal entry.

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