What is the oldest tree in Asago?
Asago's mapped tree is Itoi-no-Okatsura (the Great Katsura of Itoi), a katsura whose original trunk decayed into a hollow stump and now stands ringed by roughly eighty root suckers, together measuring over 18 metres around. Japanese sources put its age at over 1,000 years, without a firmer figure. Japan designated it a national natural monument in 1951.
The tree stands in Izushi-Itoi Prefectural Natural Park, along the upper Itoi River in Wadayama-cho, Asago, roughly a 90-minute walk from the nearest bus terminus. Its hollow main stump is large enough inside to hold six tatami mats, and a ring of root suckers around it, numbers vary by source but land near eighty, reads from a distance as a small grove rather than one tree, which is the reason people make the walk. It is a male katsura, so it never sets seed; the suckering has been its way of persisting instead. A local legend holds that a travelling high priest once draped his robe over the tree during a drought and prayed for rain, which is said to have ended the drought; the tree is still called Koromogi, the robe tree, and is revered as a water deity, marked with a sacred shimenawa rope. It nearly did not survive the 20th century: flood-control work along the adjacent river cut off its water source and buried its roots in clay fill, and it declined until arborists carried out an irrigation and soil restoration in December 2001. The trail in has no gate and no fee.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.