The Kinmokusei of Mishima Taisha

A 1985 assessment gave this tree three more years to live. Forty years on, the Kinmokusei of Mishima Taisha still stands beside the shrine's main hall, still doing the thing that made it a National Natural Monument in 1934: flowering twice in the same month. Most osmanthus bloom once. This one flowers in early September, drops its blossom within days, then flowers again roughly two weeks later, a pattern (nido-zaki, double-blooming) recorded in careful detail as far back as 1933. Locals say the fragrance carries eight kilometres downwind at peak bloom, a claim nobody has measured and everybody repeats. The tree is the shrine's sacred sanctuary tree, standing near the honden of Mishima Taisha, chief shrine of former Izu Province, where Minamoto no Yoritomo is said to have prayed in 1180 before raising the banner that ended in the Kamakura shogunate. Tradition puts the tree's age at over 1,200 years; nobody has dated it by ring count or growth rate, so treat the figure as legend rather than measurement. What nearly finished it wasn't age but neglect: decades of unchecked growth weakened the crown until that 1985 assessment. Soil improvement and mineral treatment by specialists brought it back. Every September since, a local preservation society holds Mokusei no Yuu, a night festival timed to the second bloom, wishing the tree the years it once looked short of.