Quel est l'arbre le plus vieux de Nara ?

The age is traditional rather than measured, as it is for almost every great camphor in Japan, but the size supports it and the shrine's own founding legend puts it at twelve centuries. What makes this tree worth the fifteen minute bus ride is what happens beneath it. On the evening of the eighth of October each year the shrine performs the Okina-mai, a masked dance recognised as an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property and one of the oldest surviving ancestors of Noh theatre, and it is danced in the camphor's shade. The tree stands on Narazaka, the pass that carried travellers into the capital from the north, so anyone arriving in Nara from Kyoto in the eighth century walked past it. The only serious rival for the title is the great cedar at Kasuga Taisha, which sources date at somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand years and which has the better documentary evidence.