Maebashi maps two trees. The Great Kaya of Yokomuro is a Japanese Torreya 8.1 metres round, one of the Nihon San-dai Kaya, Japan's three great kaya trees, its age disputed by seven centuries between a 1991 survey and shrine tradition. The Kinmokusei of Kezoji, in nearby Isesaki, carries a National Natural Monument's name even though the original tree it honours died of typhoon damage in the 1980s; what blooms there each October is its roughly 40 year old successor.
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Photo : さかおり (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Great Kaya of Yokomuro
Japanese Nutmeg-yew (Torreya nucifera) · 300 to over 1,000 years (sources disagree) · Fujimi, Maebashi
Japan keeps a short list of its three greatest kaya trees, and this one earns its place by sheer girth: 8.1 metres round, a trunk that makes even its two neighbours on the list, in Saitama and Hamamatsu, look modest.
The age is genuinely contested. A 1991 government survey called it just over 300 years old. The shrine tradition on site says over 1,000. Nobody has settled it, and the honest answer is to give both figures rather than pick a favourite. What nobody disputes is the size, and a Japanese Torreya at this circumference is a rare thing on its own, superlative trio or not.
A Suwa Shrine occupied this ground from 1749 until 1907, when it moved elsewhere and the Kanazawa family took over the plot. They have kept the tree as sacred ground in the century since, on land that is privately theirs, and let anyone come and look at no charge.
The National Natural Monument designation is dated 1920 by most sources, 1933 by one. 1920 is the figure the government's own heritage database uses, and the one used here.
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Photo : さかおり (CC BY 4.0)
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The Kinmokusei of Kezoji
Sweet Osmanthus (Osmanthus fragrans) · second-generation tree, about 35-40 years old · Isesaki, about 17.1 km from central Maebashi, a same-day trip
The tree that made this place famous is dead, and the one standing here now is its child. The original kinmokusei at Kezoji was 300 to 400 years old when the state made it a National Natural Monument on 15 June 1937, a trunk 2.6 to 2.8 metres round with a scent people said carried for kilometres the week it opened. Typhoons took it apart. The sources disagree on which storms did it, giving 1957, 1966 and 1982 between them, and by the late 1980s the trunk was dead.
What replaced it came off the same root. Gunma Prefecture's forestry experimental station raised saplings, and around 1987 to 1988 a second-generation tree was established on the spot. The Japanese record describes shoots pushing from the surviving root base alongside propagated cuttings; the prefecture's own tourism board simply calls it a 1988 replanting. Either way the sweet osmanthus in front of you is roughly 35 to 40 years old, growing behind a low protective fence on temple ground beside Kezoji Park.
It flowers in the middle of October, later in the month than it used to, and holds the flower for three or four days. Osmanthus announces itself before you see it, which is the whole reason anyone wrote this tree down in the first place. Six designated kinmokusei survive in Japan. This is one of those sites, still carrying the name of a tree that is no longer there.
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