KITA-YATSUGATAKE, Japan—In a line of hikers high in the Japan Alps, Maya Amano dropped into a crouch, whipped out a magnifying glass and gazed intently at the forest floor.
“Cute!” she concluded, running her hands over a clump of moss.
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It was hylocomium splendens, a common variety but a welcome find for Ms. Amano, a 30-year-old teacher on her first moss-viewing tour, with two dozen other enthusiasts. Atop a 7,000-foot mountain pass for a weekend studying the flowerless plants, they donned rubber boots to wade through swamps, gazed at moss under microscopes and listened to moss lectures.
Watching moss grow is exciting to people like Masanobu Higuchi, a Tokyo University professor who leads the tours and gives the moss talks. Appreciation of moss is part of the Japanese psyche, he says.
“When we see an old stone covered in moss,” he says, “we think it’s beautiful.”
Often trampled, ripped up or ignored elsewhere in the world, moss is getting new attention as a tourist draw in Japan.
Hoshino Resort Co., an operator of spas and traditional inns, about three years ago began offering a “Moss Girl Stay” package at a northern-Japan resort. Its website features hunky hiking guides, moss-themed drinks and hikes through mossy forests.
The package was initially available only in summer, spokeswoman Nanako Wada says, but this year it was expanded to anytime the hotel is open, because of strong demand. Most customers, she says, are women in their 20s through 40s.
Moss tours are cropping up across the archipelago. The Bryological Society of Japan, dedicated to the study of moss and other bryophytes—small rootless and flowerless plants—says membership is growing.
The enthusiasm is rooted in a history of Japanese esteem for moss. Forests offer more than 1,800 species of it, and Buddhist temple gardens are graced with moss carpets.
Japan’s national anthem mentions moss as a metaphor for the permanence of the emperors’ rule: “May your reign continue for a thousand, eight thousand generations, until the pebbles grow into boulders lush with moss.”
Moss’s intricacy and complexity satisfy a Japanese love of fine detail, Prof. Higuchi says, while its toughness—some varieties predate dinosaurs—provides a metaphor of permanence that complements the fleetingness of Japan’s most-celebrated natural symbol, the cherry blossom.
Some Japanese, not content with moss in situ, want to bring the stuff home, creating business for budding entrepreneurs.
In a Tokyo studio, Tokuyuki Wada makes moss-related products such as mini-gardens in traditional wooden sake-drinking containers, which are sold at home-furnishing retailers like Muji.
Mr. Wada, a former record-label executive who once managed a Japanese pop star, drew on his show-business experience to organize a moss-themed Valentine’s Day event. Couples attended a moss-ball-making workshop as a pop-rock group sang love songs.
He also makes moss finger rings, with small containers holding the plant where a gem normally goes, to symbolize the slow growth of a relationship—or, perhaps, the absence of one.
“You wear it and then get attached to it,” says Shinobu Hattori, manager of the Tokyo Metropolitan Teien Art Museum gift shop, which sells the rings. “And if you water it, you get the feeling it responds to you, which appeals to young women very much.”
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Mr. Wada says his moss business brings in about $120,000 a year, up fivefold since it started about six years ago.
Moss mania has a way to go before anyone can liken it to Japanese crazes like bonsai or manga in its global reach. But moss balls called kokedama, which can be hung indoors, have appeared at gardening shops in trendy foreign outposts such as Brooklyn.
David Spain, whose Raleigh, N.C., landscaping business creates moss gardens, says more American moss fans are putting Japan on their travel “bucket lists” to see the growth in its spiritual home: “That’s the Holy Grail—to go to Japan.”
Some don’t cotton to moss. Mr. Wada says he wrote Lady Gaga suggesting she wear a moss bra during her performances but never heard back. The pop star’s publicist didn’t respond to inquiries.
Prof. Higuchi says when he traveled to Cambodia, cultural officials asked him for help removing moss from temples. “I told them it’s good to have the moss,” he says. “I realized then that there are different national characteristics.”
His Kita-Yatsugatake tours started about five years ago. Mountain-hut owners in the region invited him to speak after the bryological society designated the area a “precious moss forest.”
They created a cartoon moss mascot—a smiling round face with antenna-like stalks holding spore capsules—to adorn guides’ jackets.
Prof. Higuchi teaches participants to identify species of moss and to distinguish them from another rootless but unrelated growth, the lichen. Confusing matters, moss and lichens are both called koke.
“They are kind of rivals,” he says, “as we always see them in areas where mosses are growing.”
About 485 kinds of moss have been recorded in the Kita-Yatsugatake area, and Prof. Higuchi introduces visitors to more than a dozen on tours. Guides explain the subtle differences between seitaka-sugi-goke, or tall cedar moss, and koseitaka-sugi-goke, short cedar moss. Some visitors bring cameras with macro lenses to document finds.
On the first tour, only the hut owners showed up. Last year, 250 attended six tours.
Moss-viewing “has a geeky aspect,” Prof. Higuchi says, so some fans “hesitate to talk about their interest openly out of fear that others may look at them as weird.”
“But people here are all moss lovers,” he says, “so they can let their passion out freely.”
After the recent hike, participants gathered for dinner and talked moss over fish and rice. Then came a three-hour lecture by Prof. Higuchi.
Moss events have also surfaced in places like Yakushima island, whose mossy forests were the setting for the popular anime film “Princess Mononoke.”
Prof. Higuchi is bemused by the moss “boom,” as some call it, saying it is antithetical to the plant’s nature. “We want to have quiet growth, through word-of-mouth.”
—Chieko Tsuneoka contributed to this article.
Write to Eric Pfanner at eric.pfanner@wsj.com
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