The Great Cedar of Okayama Hachiman Shrine

Two catalogues have measured this cedar and they disagree by a quarter of a metre. The Ministry of Environment's giant-tree register, surveying in 2000, wrote down 5.55 metres of girth and health good. A long-running Japanese catalogue of village giants lists the same tree at the same shrine at 5.8 metres. Both are honest figures taken at different moments by different people around a trunk that is not a cylinder, and neither has been checked since, so this page gives both rather than picking one. Nobody has published an age. What is not in dispute is where it grows: the precinct of Okayama Hachiman, a farm-country shrine in Fukutomi-cho, where the cedar stands as shrine cedars stand all over western Japan, planted or spared for the god rather than for timber and then left alone. Fukutomi is high, cold ground by Hiroshima standards, thinly populated and largely without buses. The pin is honest about its own limits: the register's own coordinate landed on the road through the district rather than on the shrine, so expect to find the torii first and walk in from there. A second registered cedar of almost exactly the same girth stands about three and a half kilometres away.