What is the oldest tree in Hiroshima?

The best-documented answer is the Chichisagari Ginkgo at Nukui Hachiman Shrine: a 1979 heritage designation puts its age at roughly 1,500 years, a broad estimate rather than a ring count. Two other trees also fall outside the A-bombed register: the Renge Pine at Renkoji temple (300 years or more by national survey) and the Lantern Cedars of Fukuoji, which carry a documented 1391 planting date even though the same national survey separately rated them at only 200 to 300 years. Every other tree on this page has only a floor of at least 81 years, since it was alive on 6 August 1945.

What is a hibakujumoku?

A tree that survived the atomic bombing. Hiroshima has registered them since 1996, on the criterion that the tree stood within roughly two kilometres of the hypocentre and lived. There are 160 on the list, across 31 species. Nagasaki keeps a similar record.

How did any tree survive at 370 metres?

Most did not survive above ground. The trees on the register were generally burned or blasted back to the trunk or the roots, and what makes them survivors is that they sprouted again, most of them in the spring of 1946, when the expectation in the city was that nothing would grow for decades.

Are Hiroshima's trees free to visit?

Sixteen of the seventeen are, standing in public parks, on temple and shrine grounds, on the street, or, for the Mount Togo cedar and the Fukuoji cedars, reached on a genuine forest or hillside walk. Shukkeien garden charges a small entry fee. Many other registered trees stand inside school grounds and are not included here for that reason.

Can you walk between them?

Mostly, for the eleven A-bombed trees. Six of them lie within a two kilometre stretch of central Hiroshima, from Peace Memorial Park north past Shirakami Shrine and the castle to the temple street at Teramachi. Shukkeien is a further kilometre east, and Anrakuji about two kilometres north of that. A camphor pair and a hackberry at Shinjo-no-miya Shrine stand another 2.3 to 2.5 kilometres north again, a genuinely separate trip rather than part of the same walk. Six more stand well outside any of this and are unrelated to the bombing: a camphor by the Ujina Lighthouse, a day trip south into Minami-ku; a pine at Renkoji temple in Nagatsuka, about four kilometres northwest of the centre; a ginkgo at Tomohiro Shrine further north again, in Kabe; a cedar on Mount Togo reached only by a genuine forest hike; three surviving Lantern Cedars on a hillside temple above Kabe, up 53 stone steps past the Niomon gate; and the Chichisagari Ginkgo at Nukui Hachiman Shrine in the Kawachi district, reached by car or local bus.

Japan

Alte Bäume in Hiroshima

17 Bäume auf der Karte

Hiroshima keeps a register of 160 trees that were standing on 6 August 1945, within about two kilometres of the hypocentre, each recorded by species, address and distance from the blast. The closest is a weeping willow 370 metres away. Almost all were burned back to the trunk and put out shoots the following spring, which is the thing people came to look at. Seventeen are here: eight downtown, three at a shrine to the north, and six unrelated giants further out, from a lighthouse camphor to a cedar deep in a Mount Togo forest.

The Willow Nearest the Hypocentre

Weeping Willow (Salix babylonica) · at least 81 years, since it was a grown tree on 6 August 1945 · Motomachi

Three hundred and seventy metres. That is the whole of what makes this willow remarkable, and it is enough: no registered survivor in Hiroshima stood closer to the point the bomb went off. It is the first entry on the city's list, N03a1-01, and the code itself carries the facts. N for north of the hypocentre, 03 for the three hundred metre band, a for never transplanted. It is standing where it stood. A weeping willow is not a strong tree. It is fast, soft-wooded and short-lived, the sort of thing a city plants along a river because it grows quickly and looks well over water, and at this distance the heat and the blast took everything above ground. What survived was underground. The willow came back from its own roots, which is how most of the trees on this register survived, and the trunk you stand in front of grew after 1945 from a root system that did not. Nobody has published its age. The register does not carry one, because the register was built to record a distance rather than a life. It stands in the Chuo Park green space west of the Youth Centre, on ground that is now grass and paths and was, for a while after 1945, expected to grow nothing at all.