The Great Camphor of Tajima Hachiman Shrine

Wrap a tape measure around this camphor and you will need eleven metres of it, roughly the wingspan of a small aircraft. It is the largest of twelve trees on these grounds that Fukuoka City has individually designated as preserved trees, a small grove of camphors and ginkgoes several hundred years old crowded into a quiet residential shrine across the Hii River from the city centre. Unlike Fukuoka's grander, more visited shrines, Tajima Hachiman keeps its own calendar: Tajima Kagura, a masked sacred dance handed down through the neighbourhood for generations, is still performed on these grounds rather than staged for tourists elsewhere. The camphor stands close to the main hall, a single column of dense evergreen crown that has outgrown its own trunk's proportions, the kind of tree whose base takes several adults holding hands to encircle. Camphor wood was prized across East Asia for shipbuilding and for warding off insects, both of which likely helped trees like this one survive centuries that felled less useful species nearby. It carries no legend as old as Fukuoka's imperial-founded shrines, and that is part of its appeal: a genuinely enormous tree, growing where people actually live, with no admission gate and no crowd between you and its trunk.