The Cypress of Yunoyama Myojin Shrine

The tree stands next to a bathhouse. Yunoyama Myojin's torii sits beside the Yunoyama Onsen-kan, in an old hot spring settlement in the mountains of Yuki-cho, about fifty minutes by road from central Hiroshima, and the shrine's hinoki cypress was measured at 3.40 metres round by the Environment Ministry's giant-tree surveyors in 1988. Health, that year: good. Hinoki is the most valued softwood in Japan. It is the timber that rebuilds the Ise shrines every twenty years, the wood of temple pillars and bath tubs, and the smell people mean when they say a Japanese bath smells of wood. A working forest does not produce a cypress of this girth, because a working forest fells them long before. The big ones are almost all standing on shrine and temple ground, which is the polite way of saying somebody decided they were not for cutting. What we have on this one is thin, and it is better said plainly than dressed up. The national register carries it, with species, girth and a health note, and beyond that we have found only general confirmation that the shrine and its torii stand where the register puts them, beside the bathhouse. No age has ever been published. Nothing we can find has been written about the tree itself. If you have soaked at Yunoyama and looked up on the way out, tell us what is there.