The Married Camphor and Great Ginkgo of Torikai Hachimangu

Despite the name, the Married Camphor is one tree, not two. Its trunk forks into a pair from a single base low to the ground, which is exactly why visitors to Torikai Hachimangu read it as a couple rather than a single specimen, and why a shrine built around relationships adopted it as a symbol for exactly that. Cords get tied to its shimenawa rope by people hoping their own pairing holds as well as the tree's two trunks have. Twelve metres away, flanking the shrine's torii from the other side, stands the Great Ginkgo, called locally the Ibuki Ginkgo. The shrine's own account puts its age at five to six hundred years, a figure with no independent source found to confirm it, so treat it as tradition rather than a documented fact, the same caution this page applies to a wartime survival story attached to the tree elsewhere online, which nothing beyond the shrine's own telling supports. Both trees stand in the open shrine forecourt, free to visit at any hour a Shinto shrine keeps its grounds open, reachable on foot from either Tojinmachi or Nishijin subway station. Camphor on the left of the torii, ginkgo on the right, both close enough to touch from the same few steps.