The Ginkgo of Genko-ji

The national giant-tree survey found this ginkgo in 2000, measured its trunk at 3.16 metres round, and recorded it in good health. That is the whole of what is written about it: no city cultural-properties list names it, no local history blog has photographed it, and nobody has published an age. A girth over three metres clears the register's own floor for what counts as a giant, and a ginkgo that size is rarely young, but the honest answer here is a gap rather than a guess. Genko-ji stands in Kotada, a rural hamlet in Kurose-cho, the kind of small temple this survey keeps turning up once you stop searching only for famous names. The register's own coordinate resolves to the temple site rather than the trunk itself, so the last few metres are a matter of looking around rather than following a pin exactly. There is no train station nearby. Reaching it means a car and thirty to forty minutes south of central Saijo, through the hills that hold most of this city's oldest trees away from any platform.