Horaiji maps two trees on the pilgrim stairway up Mount Horaiji, a National Scenic Beauty and Natural Monument since 1931 and home to one of Japan's three great Tosho-gu shrines. Kasa sugi, a cedar once measured as Japan's tallest at over sixty metres, fans out like an open umbrella above the Nio-mon gate. Further down, a juniper called Nezu no Ki carries a disputed age spanning over a thousand years.
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Kasa sugi
Japanese Cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) · about 800 years · Mount Horaiji (Horaijisan), Shinshiro
For decades this was the tallest cedar in Japan, somewhere between 59.6 and 60.8 metres depending on which survey you read. Aichi's tourism pages and Shinshiro's own still say so. A cedar at Hanase, north of Kyoto, was measured at 62.3 metres in 2017 and now holds the record, which takes nothing off the sixty metres standing here.
Kasa means umbrella, and the name is literal. The upper trunk fans into limbs in every direction, so from the steps below the crown reads as an open parasol. The base measures about 7.5 metres round. Its age is given everywhere as about 800 years, with no measurement or growth rate behind the number, so read that as tradition rather than a date.
The tree stands beside the 1,425 stone steps that climb Mount Horaiji to the temple at the top, above the Nio-mon gate rebuilt in 1651. The whole mountain has been a National Scenic Beauty and Natural Monument since 1931, and the cedar was picked for the New Japan Famous Trees, 100 Selection.
Nobody has published a coordinate for the tree itself, only for the temple complex, so expect to find it by climbing rather than by map. Hikers photographed it in place in April 2024.
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2
The Nezu no Ki of Horaiji
Temple Juniper (Juniperus rigida) · disputed: sources give either roughly 300 years or 1,400+ years · Kadoya, Shinshiro City, Aichi Prefecture (Mt Horaiji approach path)
Sources on this juniper disagree by more than a thousand years, and both figures are kept here rather than picking one to sound confident. A photograph on Wikimedia Commons describes it as more than 1,400 years old; the local newspaper, reporting on a Horaiji-san Museum exhibition of the city's designated natural monuments, says roughly 300, and calls it the largest and oldest Nezu juniper west of Kanagawa Prefecture. Three hundred years sits far closer to what is known of the species generally, a juniper claiming fourteen centuries would be an extreme outlier, so read the newspaper's figure as the likelier one and the museum's as the honest alternative.
It grows on the public stone stairway up Mount Horaiji, one of the 1,425 steps' quieter landmarks, below the cedar known as Kasa sugi further up the same path. Restoration work in 1996 brought its vigour back after decline, and a dated 2021 photograph shows it alive and holding. Most people climbing past are headed for the temple at the top and the mountain's own fame as one of Japan's three great Tosho-gu sites; this tree is what you pass on the way, not the reason most people set out.
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