The Cedar of Ato Myojin Shrine

In 1974 the cedar at Ato Myojin Shrine measured 3.41 metres round. In 2000 the Environment Ministry's giant-tree surveyors put a tape around it and got 4.10 metres. Sixty nine centimetres in twenty six years, while the evergreen laurel standing a few steps away in the same grove managed eleven. Cryptomeria japonica does that. It is the tree Japan has planted for timber and for shrines for more than a thousand years, straight, fast and fibrously red-barked, and a shrine cedar left standing rather than cut is a cedar allowed to show what the species can do. This one was recorded in good health. The grove around it is what the city actually protected, listed as a natural monument in February 1974, up in the hills of Numata-cho well outside central Hiroshima. Shrine tradition dates the foundation to 852 and a reorganisation to 1837. Several trees here are said to have been planted around that rebuilding, but no source ties this cedar to that date or to any other, so its age is genuinely open. One loose end we would rather state than hide: a local account refers to a giant cedar at this shrine that is no longer there. We have not been able to read it, and it may well describe a different tree, since the surviving cedar is the one both the 1974 and the 2000 records measure. If you have walked up recently, tell us what is standing.