The sand dunes of Tottori sprawl 10 miles along the sea here, cresting some 200 feet above an oasis-like pool of water in the middle of fine, golden sand. Sculptured, endlessly refashioned by the wind and the sea, the dunes have long fueled fantasies of the Sahara among travelers to this remote slice of Japan. The width of the Tottori beach has eroded by 130 feet since 1947.

One early 20th-century novelist came here and wrote about the dunes a few weeks before he and his lover killed themselves in a double suicide. Decades later, Kobo Abe visited here before writing his classic novel “The Woman in the Dunes.” But the dunes are shrinking, victims of changing currents, encroaching weeds and crabgrass. Patches of green keep sand from moving freely and ripples from forming. From the Sahara to the Gobi Desert, governments elsewhere are planting trees in a struggle to check expanding deserts. But officials here are focusing their efforts on trying to preserve Tottori’s landmark tourist spot, grain by grain.

So early Saturday, on a morning already humid at 6 a.m., some 40 volunteers were moving up a gently sloping hill on their hands and knees, filling plastic bags with grass they had uprooted with their hands. “I haven t been here in decades,” said Michiko Ogawa, 57, a housewife who was taking part for the first time in Tottori Prefecture s three-year-old preservation campaign. “It s pretty. But it s not the same as before. I m not sure what it is, but it’s changed. It s possible I felt it was larger because I was small. There are also a lot of weeds now.”

In the last five years, the sand dunes are estimated to have shrunk by tens of thousands of cubic yards. New seawalls nearby have changed the currents that long carried sand to the dunes, and the lack of fresh sand appears to have made it easier for rainfall to accumulate and previously unseen weeds to grow. “There s the fear that the balance of the sand dunes may have collapsed,” said Toshiaki Hotta, 50, who oversees this site for the prefectural government. “The sand dunes are tens of thousands of years old, so we human beings can’t have our own way. If we stop weeding, it will become grassland in no time.”

The dunes were formed by sand carried by the nearby Sendai River from inland mountains. The sand, expelled into the Sea of Japan, drifted back to the beach and eventually formed a miniature desert. But seawalls at a nearby port, built in the 1980 s, disrupted the flow of the ocean waves. The width of the beach is estimated to have eroded by 130 feet between 1947 and 2003, according to aerial photos.

Starting last year, two workboats began taking sand from the bottom of the port and dumping it a third of a mile offshore from the dunes, so that ocean waves will carry the sand naturally to shore. Only a fraction has ended up drifting to shore, so it is too early to tell how effective this effort will be in the long run.

For centuries, the dunes were regarded by local people as more of a nuisance than anything else, said Hajime Nishio, 53, the vice director of Tottori’s central library. But references to the dunes in literature started changing their image in the early 20th century.

It was in 1923 when Takeo Arishima, a novelist with a strong following among women, came to lecture in Tottori and visited the dunes. Mr. Nishio said Arishima was the first to refer to this area as sand dunes, in a poem in which he wrote about the deep misery he felt while standing in the middle of the dunes. His despair stemmed in part from his doomed love affair with Akiko Hatano, a married woman who was the editor of a popular women s magazine. Her husband had sued Arishima over the affair, accusing him of breaking up his family. Weeks after writing about his plight, Arishima and his lover hanged themselves in a double suicide — an incident that made the sand dunes famous all over the country, Mr. Nishio said.

After World War II, as the authorities put a priority on increasing Japan s food supply, they tried to develop the sand dunes into farmland and planted pine trees. Eventually, though, the area was designated a national park. Japanese tourists began gravitating here. Kobo Abe is said to have visited a desertification center at Tottori University to conduct research for “The Woman in the Dunes,” a story about a man who falls into a sand pit where a strange woman dwells alone. Kenji Ota, 65, a retired salaryman who used to work in Osaka, first came here in 1966 to take photos of the dunes. He had tired of taking photos of actresses or other subjects, but found a limitless source of inspiration here. Mr. Ota moved here and opened an inn called Smile in the mid-1980’s, quitting his salaryman’s life in Osaka.

“My friends said I d be back in two to three years, but it’s already been 20 years,” Mr. Ota said. “The sand dunes change every day, so I’m never bored. It’s different every time — in the morning, the evening, after a rain or a storm. There does exist a place like this in Japan.”

Now, visitors from Tokyo and other cities stay at his inn to visit the dunes. “They’re looking for spiritual healing,” Mr. Ota said. On Saturday morning, one volunteer, Hiroyuki Tanioka, 42, was weeding for the third time, crouching on the sand, working intently. “My stress level goes up when I’m busy working or when I’m dealing with people,” he said. “When my work increases, I feel stressed. Weeding — I can do at my own pace. The sand dunes soothe my soul.”
(Por Norimitsu Onishi, The N.Y. Times, 23/08/2006)