Atami maps one tree: the Great Camphor of Kinomiya Shrine, one of Japan's Three Great Camphors and, by the government's own 1988 survey, the second largest tree in the country. Local tradition says circling it once adds a year to your life, and every May 5 the shrine holds a festival built around it. Published alone here because the tree itself is the destination, not because Atami's research is finished.
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The Great Camphor of Kinomiya Shrine
Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · traditionally said to be about 2000 years · Kinomiya Shrine, Atami
Circle this camphor once, local tradition says, and you gain a year of life. Kinomiya Shrine's Great Camphor is one of Japan's Three Great Camphors, ranked the second largest tree in the country by the Environment Agency's 1988 giant-tree survey, beaten only by a camphor in Kagoshima. Tradition puts its age at about 2000 years, a figure the shrine itself repeats rather than one any dating has confirmed; no growth-rate estimate exists, so it stays a legend on this page rather than a fact.
The shrine's founding story and the tree's are the same story. In 710, a fisherman's net kept catching a wooden idol, until it told him in a dream to found a shrine wherever seven great camphors grew together. This is meant to be one of them.
It has not had an easy few centuries. Around the Meiji Restoration, loggers made a partial attempt to fell it for timber, and the trunk that survived split into two. A 1974 typhoon snapped the south trunk off five metres up; the break is still capped with sheet metal today. Combined, the two trunks measure 15.65 metres round.
None of it has slowed the crowd. Every May 5 the shrine holds the Okusu Festival, with a ceremonial dance composed specifically for the tree, and the whole site is lit through the evening, 17:00 to 23:00, nightly.
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