The Great Zelkova of Haramachi

One of Japan's three great zelkovas stands in the middle of a road junction. Traffic in Haramachi goes around it, where two Gunma prefectural roads meet. In 1868 an official proposed felling it for timber for the new prefectural government building. Townspeople objected, and when the saw went in it found the trunk already hollow, with sap that looked like blood. The work stopped there. Locals called it Tsukinoki, an old word for zelkova, long enough for the name to become the name of the place, and tradition holds that the town's streets were laid out in 1614 along a sightline between this trunk and a rock formation behind Iwabitsu Castle. The botanist Miyoshi Manabu, whose 1932 survey drew up the trio, measured it then at 16.89 metres round at the roots and 10.97 at chest height, with one limb reaching 22 metres to the northeast. A 2021 prefectural survey gives 17 metres tall and 9.10 metres round. Much of that gap is loss. Vigour has fallen away since about 1965, branches are gone, the trunk is largely a shell, and what keeps it alive are roots that grew down inside its own cavity. Steel pipes carry the rest. Its age is put at roughly a thousand years and nobody has narrowed it further. A cutting from it grows at the town sports ground, as insurance.