Itoi-no-Okatsura (The Great Katsura of Itoi)

During a historic drought, a travelling priest is said to have draped his robe over this katsura and prayed for rain. It is said to have worked, and the tree has been called Koromogi, the robe tree, ever since. What stands there today is not one trunk. The original trunk decayed into a hollow stump large enough inside to hold six tatami mats, and around it rose a ring of roughly eighty root suckers that from a distance read as a small grove rather than a single tree, which is the whole reason for the walk. The combined clump measures over 18 metres around. Officials named it a national natural monument in 1951, one of Japan's largest and rarest katsura specimens. Sources put its age at over 1,000 years, some further still, without ever settling on a number. It is a male tree and never sets seed; the suckering is how it has kept itself going across the centuries instead. It nearly did not survive the modern era: flood-control work along the adjacent river sealed off its water and buried its roots in clay fill, and the tree declined until arborists carried out a restoration in 2001. It still stands where the priest is said to have stood, in a prefectural park with no gate and no fee, marked with a sacred rope as a water deity. Reaching it takes a 90-minute walk up the gorge from the nearest bus stop, which is exactly why it has never become crowded.