The Great Ginkgo of Arita

In September 2020 the house next door moved twenty metres down the road, because a 2018 arborist survey found this ginkgo dropping branches large enough to worry about. The tree stayed, now cable-braced, and it has stood on this spot since long before Arita became known worldwide for porcelain. In 1926 it earned the very first National Natural Monument designation the Japanese government ever gave to a ginkgo, ahead of nineteen more that have followed since. It shades Izumiyama Benzaiten Shrine, right beside the Izumiyama quarry where the discovery of kaolin clay in the early 1600s started Japan's porcelain industry. During the Edo period a customs checkpoint stood under its canopy, watching the road for anyone trying to move porcelain out of the district without paying tax. Local tradition also credits the tree with shielding neighbouring houses from a fire whipped up by an 1828 typhoon. Its scale has outgrown its own measurements. The trunk runs eight metres round at chest height; the base, swollen with the aerial roots old ginkgos grow, measures closer to eleven. Height is about forty metres, crown spread thirty-one. Sources even disagree on whether it is male or female, an open question for anyone who looks closely enough to settle it. The age, 850 to over 1,000 years, comes from its size rather than any record of planting.