The Great Camphor of Kinomiya Shrine

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.