https://skiwhitefish.com/ski-among-the-snow-ghosts-at-whitef...

I suspect you're just talking about small trees frozen over,which are indeed very common (1-3m). The habitat for trees being frozen like that just generally comes with strong winds all-year-round, which hampers their grows.

That's what made the Japanese ones special in the eyes of the people that were interviewed for this article - the gargantuan trees looking like monsters because of the size of the trees

> In the 1930s, we saw juhyo five to six metres [16-20ft] across," Yanagisawa says. "By the postwar decades, they were often two to three metres [7-10ft]. Since 2019, many are half a metre [1.6ft] or less. Some are barely columns."

> The cause is twofold, says Yanagisawa: a warming climate and a forest under attack. The host tree, Aomori todomatsu, suffered a moth outbreak in 2013 that stripped its needles. Bark beetles followed in 2015, boring into weakened trunks. Yamagata officials report that around 23,000 firs, about a fifth of the prefectural side's stands, have died. With fewer branches and leaves, there is little surface for snow and ice to cling to.

It's just documentation of change, with a reference to temperature trends, and to another major cause (which they do not suggest, but might also be related to temperature change, as it is thought to be in other locations).

The trees are famous, and important to local tourism. It's a story.