The Cedar of Omori Hachiman Shrine

The Environment Ministry's surveyors reached this shrine in 1988, put a tape round the cedar at chest height and got 5.80 metres. Then they did something the register rarely does: they gave the tree an age. Over three hundred years. That figure is the register's own rather than ours, and it is a band rather than a date. Take it at face value and this cedar was already standing in the late 1600s, stood through the rest of the Edo period, and was standing in August 1945, an hour of mountain road west of what happened to the city. Yuki-cho is deep in Saeki-ku, and the distance is the whole of the reason. Omori Hachiman is a small shrine at Fushidani, two minutes from the Omori bus stop and roughly fifty minutes from central Hiroshima. The old Saeki-gun gazetteer traces its founding to a transfer from Usa Hachimangu in the Yomei era, which is the lineage most Hachiman shrines in western Japan claim and few can document. The cedar was recorded in good health. A daimyo oak of 3.30 metres stands on the same ground, and the register gives that one the same three hundred years. What no source gives is a planting date, or any story attached to this particular trunk. Somebody in Omori almost certainly knows one. If that is you, tell us.