Atami maps three trees, none of them ordinary. The Great Camphor of Kinomiya Shrine is one of Japan's Three Great Camphors and, by the government's own 1988 survey, the country's second largest tree. A short train ride away in Yugawara stands the Byakushin of Joganji Temple, a juniper leaning south for well over 800 years. One stop the other way, at Mishima Taisha, an osmanthus once given three years to live now flowers twice every September. All three stand on shrine or temple ground, free to visit, having outlived the wars and storms that shaped this coast.
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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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The Byakushin of Joganji Temple
Chinese Juniper (Juniperus chinensis) · over 800 years · Yugawara (a hot-spring town about 6 km from Atami, within the day-trip boundary; not administratively part of Atami)
A juniper this old should stand straight, and this one does the opposite: its trunk twists into a spiral and leans hard to the south, a shape recorded as far back as a 1938 government survey. At Joganji Temple above Yugawara, one stop by train from Atami, the Byakushin has been growing this way for well over 800 years.
The temple's own founding is bound up with the tree. Local tradition credits either the Kamakura-period warlord Doi Sanehira or his lord Minamoto no Yoritomo, whose retainer founded Joganji, with the planting, though nothing dates the tree to either man directly, so the story stays a story rather than a measured age. What is measured is the trunk: 6.3 metres round at breast height, 8.5 metres at the base, rising 20 metres into a crown that spreads unevenly, heavier on one side than the other from centuries of leaning the same way.
The Agency for Cultural Affairs designated it a national Natural Monument in 1939, and photographs from 2024 show the same healthy crown, with only minor dieback on its north side. The stone steps past the temple gate climb to a plaza east of the main hall, where the juniper has been twisting itself into its own shape for the better part of a millennium, free to see, no ticket required.
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The Kinmokusei of Mishima Taisha
Sweet Osmanthus (Osmanthus fragrans var. thunbergii) · over 1,200 years, by shrine tradition · Omiya-cho, Mishima (a separate city about 14 km from Atami, one JR Tokaido Line stop or a few minutes by Shinkansen away, well within the day-trip boundary; not administratively part of Atami)
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.
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