What is the oldest tree in Atami?
Atami's only mapped tree, and its oldest, is the Great Camphor of Kinomiya Shrine (Cinnamomum camphora), a National Natural Monument traditionally said to be about 2000 years old, standing in the grounds of Kinomiya Shrine a five minute walk from Kinomiya Station.
The tree and the shrine share one founding legend: 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. Local tradition holds that circling this one once adds a year to a visitor's life, and every May 5 the shrine holds the Okusu Festival, with a ceremonial dance composed specifically for the tree. Ranked the second-largest tree in Japan by the Environment Agency's 1988 national giant-tree survey, after a camphor in Kagoshima, and one of the country's 'Three Great Camphors'. Around the Meiji Restoration, loggers made a partial attempt to fell it for timber and the surviving trunk split into two; a 1974 typhoon then snapped five metres off the south trunk, and the break is still capped with sheet metal today. Combined, the two trunks measure 15.65 metres round. Its traditional age of about 2000 years is a legend the shrine itself repeats rather than a scientifically dated figure, and no growth-rate estimate has been published, so the page states the range honestly rather than picking a number. Free to enter, and lit nightly from 17:00 to 23:00.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.