The Great Cedar of Uneyama Shrine

At 6.2 metres round this is the thickest trunk in Higashi-Hiroshima's register, and a separate Japanese catalogue of village giants makes it thicker still at 6.5. Neither figure is recent. The national survey took its measurement in 2000 and graded the tree partial dieback at the same time, meaning parts of the crown were dying then; a cedar can carry that for a very long time, and the shrine has kept the tree. It stands in the grove that Hiroshima Prefecture declared a natural monument in December 1987, eight giant trees of five species around the hall of Uneyama Shrine, on a low hill in the farmland of Kiyotake. The grove was hit hard by the typhoon of 1991, which felled several of its protected trees and damaged the shrine building. The survey that measured this trunk came nine years after that storm, so this one came through. Sugi around a shrine are rarely accidental. They are planted at a founding or spared at a clearing and then tended by a parish, and the ones that reach six metres have been looked after by generations of people who wrote none of it down, which is why the register holds a girth for this tree and no age at all.