The Weeping Akashide of Sajigami Shrine

Every weeping akashide in Japan is a graft taken from this one tree. Akashide, the red-vein hornbeam, grows all over the country; a weeping form of it has turned up in the wild exactly once, here, beside the approach path of Sajigami-jinja in the hills of western Tokyo. The others, a few elsewhere in Hinode, one in Fussa, one in Tochigi that died in 1933, are all descended from this trunk by a difficult grafting technique, because seedlings and cuttings come up ordinary and upright. Local tradition says it was carried from Yamashiro province when the shrine was founded, seven hundred years ago. The town's own science says no. Between 2008 and 2011 Hinode ran a vigour-recovery survey with tree doctors and observers from the Agency for Cultural Affairs. They counted about 150 rings in a dead limb, compared a girth of 135 centimetres recorded in 1939 with 198 centimetres in 2010, and put the tree at roughly 180 to 200 years. No akashide anywhere is known to live near seven centuries, and the town says plainly that the older figure has no clear basis. It has been a national Natural Monument since August 1942, and as of 2013 the only one in Japan from the entire birch family. It is also six metres tall and easy to walk past. In 2010 the town felled 33 neighbouring trees to give it its light back.