When I first visited the Tottori Sand Dunes, I was speechless.
They were much larger than I had imagined. For a moment, I felt as if I were standing in a real desert. That surprised me because the Tottori Sand Dunes are not a desert at all. It has four distinct seasons. It receives plenty of rain, and it even snows in winter.
So how can a place like this have such massive sand dunes?
Most deserts exist because the climate is extremely dry. Very little rain falls, and plants struggle to grow.
Tottori was created in a completely different way. Over tens of thousands of years, rivers carried sand from the mountains to the Sea of Japan. Then, strong seasonal winds blew that sand inland, gradually building the dunes we see today. Tottori’s dunes were shaped by mountains, rivers, the sea, and wind working together.
That’s why Japan can have a landscape that looks like a desert, even though it is far from dry.Standing there, I realized that places can look remarkably similar, yet have completely different stories behind them.
先日、鳥取砂丘に立ったとき、想像以上のスケールの大きさに圧倒されました。まるで砂漠のような景色なのに、鳥取は四季があり、冬には雪も降る場所です。そのギャップがとても不思議でした。調べてみると、この砂丘は何万年もの歳月をかけて、山、川、海、そして風という自然の力が少しずつつくり上げてきたものだそうです。人間の一生では想像もできない時間の積み重ねに思いを馳せ、目の前の景色がより壮大に感じられました。